Cybersecurity edges out AI in 2025 state CIO priorities list

Cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and digital government are projected to be state chief information officers’ top priorities in the coming year, according to annual survey results published Thursday by the National Association of State CIOs.

The publication marks NASCIO’s 18th annual priorities listwhich organizers said is intended to inform technology vendors, media, other associations and the CIOs themselves about the most influential IT trends in state and local government offices. CIOs or their equivalents from fifty states and territories participated this year.

Doug Robinson, the group’s executive director, told StateScoop that he watched this year as cybersecurity and AI raced “neck and neck” for the top slot, only to see cybersecurity clinch the top priority for the 12th consecutive year.

But AI is quickly dominating the agendas of many technology officials. In addition to the group’s priorities list, it also published an accompanying list of CIOs’ top 10 “priority technologies, applications and tools.” This year, AI and robotic process automation technologies took the top spot, beating out the second place technology, legacy application modernization, by a decent margin, Robinson said.

Robinson also pointed to accessibility, which ranked at No. 10, ranking perhaps because of digital accessibility requirements the Department of Justice will begin enforcing in the coming years.

With the exception of AI’s sudden explosion, NASCIO’s annual priorities list tends to evolve slowly, with new priorities climbing or falling according to government’s emerging needs. Robinson recalled how the first survey — which he said began on a whim during a 2006 meeting and used paper ballots instead of the digital ballots NASCIO began using around 2014 — was dominated by “consolidation and optimization,” an item that’s since fallen off the top 10 list entirely.

“That was always No. 1, trying to consolidate the data centers, the environment, trying to optimize,” he said. “It dropped off the list last year for the first time and it remains off the list, so I think we’re seeing some maturity in there. Same thing with cloud services. Cloud was high on the list for many, many years and we see how it’s the eight or nine slot the last couple years because we’re seeing more maturity around cloud, so it’s not a strategic priority as much as it was four or five years ago.”

In addition to its popular biannual conferences and awards programs, NASCIO also publishes numerous reports each year. This year, the group tapped its membership to research cybersecurity in underserved communities, generative AI, enterprise architecture, accessibility and privacy, but the group’s simple top 10 list remains its most popular publication.

NASCIO Deputy Executive Director Meredith Ward said it answers questions the group gets asked almost daily: “What are CIOs doing, what are they thinking about?”

“It’s amazing how much feedback we get on this,” Ward said. “It’s very easily digestible. I know a lot of our companies use it to do sales team education for the coming year for SLED. It’s the most widely used publication that we do every single year, and it’s the shortest. Go figure.”

NASCIO’s top 10 priorities for 2025:

1. Cybersecurity and risk management
2. Artificial intelligence / machine learning / robotic process automation
3. Digital government / digital services
4. Data management and analytics
5. Legacy modernization
6. Budget / cost control / fiscal management
7. Identity and access management
8. Cloud services
9. Workforce
10. Accessibility

NASCIO’s top 10 priority technologies, applications and tools for 2025:

1. Artificial intelligence / robotic process automation
2. Legacy application modernization / renovation
3. Identity and access management
4. Cloud solutions
5. Data management
6. Security enhancement tools
7. Low code / no code software development
8. Enterprise resource planning
9. Data analytics
10. Automated fraud detection