For the primary time in 12 years, cybersecurity is just not the highest precedence for state chief data officers.
The Nationwide Affiliation of State CIOs discovered of their annual survey that, no shock, synthetic intelligence has vaulted to the lead spot.
Doug Robinson, the chief director of NASCIO, mentioned whereas AI’s ascension is expounded to the hype across the capabilities, to a point, it’s additionally a recognition that these applied sciences, whether or not generative, agentic or fundamental, is a part of broad strategic agenda.
“They all are working on policies and frameworks for acceptable use, ethical use, responsible use and all the legal issues. They’re looking at the solutions for the enterprise too,” Robinson mentioned on Ask the CIO. “When we look go back to our 2025 CIO survey, which has a deeper kind of set of data around this, we saw that happening where we had over 90% of the state CIOs reported that they running pilot projects and Gen AI proofs of concept. Many of them had requested a separate funding streams to work on Gen AI pilots. They creating governance models and centers of excellence.”
The opposite prime priorities embrace cybersecurity, price range and value management, modernization and digital providers.
For AI, it’s not simply pilots which are driving the precedence, however practically each state legislator is contemplating payments that may impression how AI is used.
Robinson mentioned state lawmakers have launched greater than 1,000 totally different payments in 2025 alone. That’s up from over 500 in 2024.
“AI’s ascension into number one is really kind of unprecedented from the top 10 these topics, and many of them have been in the top 10 for 10 or 15 years. AI just rocketed right out from being not on it, all the way up to number three, number two and now number one and in consecutive years,” Robinson mentioned. “Legislators are concerned about a number of things around AI safety and on the executive branch side, they are focused on building capacity. What are they going to do about governance? What are they going to do about moving these pilots into production? I suspect that’s going to be the major thrust in 2026.”
On the legislative aspect, some states had been extra energetic than others. Robinson mentioned, for instance, California had 40 payments and Texas had 38. And the agendas of the payments themselves have modified significantly over the past couple years: In 2024, lawmakers targeted closely on the usage of AI in authorities, particularly its effectiveness. In 2025, that focus shifted externally to what Robinson described as “regulatory oversight of AI in the marketplace,” citing issues about deepfakes and baby security as main examples.
Trying much more broadly, there’s hardly any market that’s unaffected.
“There’s a whole set of kind of lines of business that are concerned about the disintermediation impact of AI on their line of work. Some simple examples bills that are induced by land surveyors. They were looking for some kind of protection from the state, demanding that they can’t use Gen AI to do land surveying,” Robinson mentioned. “Then, of course, the state’s concerned about the use of their contractors and partners, and legislators are introducing legislation that essentially prohibiting the use of Gen AI for things like Medicaid eligibility determination or healthcare review or insurance eligibility. They’re basically blocking all those saying you cannot use Gen AI for them and there must be humans that are making these decisions, not some automated machine learning algorithm with the large language model sitting behind it.”
As for the CIO, Robinson mentioned many state workplaces have been doing the foundational work for a number of years. He mentioned between 80% and 90% of state CIOs have carried out frameworks that embrace accountable use pointers and different enterprise insurance policies. Moreover, NASCIO has discovered that a big majority of the states have documented their use instances.
“Almost 90% have created some kind of [AI] task force. You look at that as the overarching governance and policy work, and then when you look at what are they actually doing, they’re cranking up staff and employee training because employee readiness is a big target,” Robinson mentioned. “When we ask them to begin to articulate, what are their common use cases? What do they see from pilot to production right now? Predominantly already out there utilization are chat bots and virtual assistants for citizen services. We have states that have essentially transformed their state portals to one where they’re using ChatGPT and other type AI supported search services.”
Robinson mentioned different frequent makes use of instances included chatbots, doc era, coverage evaluation, summarization, drafting of memos, doing analysis and producing and reviewing code.
Even with all the joy round AI, Robinson mentioned cybersecurity and the opposite subjects nonetheless garner a big quantity of consideration.
Previous priorities stay prime of thoughts
One shock on this yr’s survey was the return of price range and value management, which Robinson mentioned had dropped off the checklist.
He mentioned with the tip of funding from the COVID pandemic, states are projecting decrease budgets and extra fiscal belt tightening.
“The priority modernization always on the list. I think that’s just the aspirational. Every CIO aspires to have a modern environment with modern application development. States still have a lot of a lot of technical debt,” Robinson mentioned. “Many of these other topics have been on the on the list consistently for years. Cloud services, I think, has been on the list for 16 years. Consolidation goes back to the mid-2000s. That was number one for a number of years.”
One of many latest priorities for 2026 is accessibility. Robinson mentioned it is because states are below an April 2026 deadline to remediate their web sites and cellular providers to satisfy accessibility necessities primarily based on the Justice Division’s 2024 rule.
Robinson mentioned general, NASCIO’s 2025 survey discovered each good and dangerous information. The excellent news, he mentioned, is about 70% of the state CIOs indicated accessibility is already included of their organizational directives and CIOs are main these efforts.
The dangerous information, Robinson mentioned, is about half the states haven’t devoted funding to help the accessibility providers and to help these modernization initiatives.
“Essentially, half of the states reported that they’re in progress, but a third of them said that they have a plan, but they haven’t begun to implement the plan,” he mentioned. “As of October, only one state reported to us that they are fully implemented changes to comply with the 2026 deadline. That gives you a sense of what the challenges are. Most are still in progress and they’re going to have to work with a lot of third-party vendors that are under state contracts, and they have to build that into their contracts to make sure the changes happen.”
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