Leading without a blueprint: the new reality for European technology chiefs

Ask a Fortune 500 Europe technology chief what they actually do in 2026 and the answer rarely lines up with the org chart. They are running infrastructure, but at the same time are also drafting board papers on regulatory exposure, briefing audit committees, developing cybersecurity strategies and more. ‘CIO’, ‘CTO’ and ‘CISO’ remain the formal titles common at Fortune 500 companies, but the roles behind them are among the most consequential and least defined in the European C-Suite. “It’s a bit like the Wild West,” says Anna Thomas, co-founder and director of the Institute for the Future of Work. “There is a lot of nervousness [for tech leaders] about doing it right, about compliance, about changes of law, about what’s in their domain and what’s not in their domain,” she says. Emma Smith, who’s been CISO at Vodafone since 2015, describes the same uncertainty from within the role. The founding priorities of the job–baseline security, knowing the business and the people–“haven’t changed.” The context, however, has changed. “Cyber risk, for example, is volatile and requires constant management,” she says. “There is no finish line.” Conversations with technology leaders and researchers across Europe point to a role reshaped by AI–and to real gaps in skills and pipeline that have come with it. The picture that emerges is of a job that has outgrown its title–and a generation of leaders writing the blueprint as they go. The job that quietly changed shape Senior technology roles inside large companies are being reshaped as companies are giving them more responsibility for business strategy. At the 124-year-old Danish shipping company, Maersk, Navneet Kapoor’s title changed from chief transformation officer to chief technology and information officer–a deliberate move. “I don’t break these roles, because then it really creates more silos and handoffs,” he says. “I want end-to-end accountability.” Two years ago, his seat was lifted onto Maersk’s executive board–a signal, he