Digital transformation has become the corporate equivalent of background noise: always humming, never stopping, impossible to escape. The past few years have delivered change at a relentless pace, including new identity systems, cloud expansions, AI features inside familiar tools, updated security controls and workflow redesigns. None of it is insignificant, and none of it slows down. Across interviews I have conducted in the last year with IT and security leaders, the same issue keeps coming up: the pace of change now exceeds what many teams can realistically take on.
Executives rarely say this outright, but many acknowledge privately that the speed of modernization has exceeded their teams’ ability to absorb it. Technology moves quickly; people move at a human pace. That gap is where burnout begins.
When transformation outruns the people responsible for it
In several discussions, IT and security leaders described stretches where major initiatives landed too close together. Identity changes overlapped with new workflow automation and updated security controls, and the accumulated impact became hard for teams to absorb. Teams were enthusiastic about the work, but worn down by the pace.
In an interview for an emerging-technology project, a security leader explained that his environment had grown so interconnected that his team spent considerable time moving between systems just to keep up. The volume of tools required constant context-shifting, which added weight to even straightforward tasks.
In conversations I’ve had this year about AI and SaaS governance, several leaders noted that minor feature updates inside familiar platforms disrupted workflows. Employees had just adjusted to one change when another appeared, and that steady stream of adjustments created uncertainty and fatigue.
In cloud-modernization interviews, leaders often mentioned that older systems remained active long after newer platforms were introduced. Teams ended up managing both environments at once, which added operational overhead and made it difficult to establish a clear, stable rhythm in their work.
These examples don’t come from outliers. They track closely with broader research on change fatigue. For example, one survey showed that more than a third of employees (35%) report severe stress from continuous workplace changes, and two-thirds (67%) expect the pace of disruption to accelerate.
Other research has reached a similar conclusion: Transformation efforts fail less because of technology limitations and more because organizations underestimate the cultural and human conditions required to absorb constant change.
The reality is this: People want to embrace transformation but are overwhelmed by how often the ground moves beneath them.
Forces behind the disconnect
Organizations rarely transform in one direction at a time. While identity is modernizing, cloud environments reorganize. While AI pilots are underway, security policies shift. Business units introduce new applications to solve immediate needs. None of these developments are wrong, and none are avoidable. The problem is the convergence of all of them on the same workforce.
The cumulative effect is erosion. Small adjustments that require a little attention here and a little relearning there build up. The workload quietly increases, even if the strategic story looks orderly on a slide.
Burnout here is subtle. It shows up as hesitation, reduced engagement, slower adoption or reluctance to test new features. People gravitate toward the familiar because the unfamiliar keeps multiplying.
In an interview with Visa CISO Subra Kumaraswamy, he discussed how large-scale security operations manage volume and complexity. Even with advanced automation, he emphasized that the goal isn’t to accelerate humans indefinitely, but to remove low-value cognitive load deliberately.
“So AI-driven is really to ensure we reduce the toil, we reduce the manual, laborious work that happens behind the scenes,” Kumaraswamy said.
The emphasis, he said, is not on replacing people, but on preserving their capacity to think, investigate, and adapt as systems continue to change.
How effective CIOs are adjusting
In multiple interviews across IT and security projects, leaders described making progress when they paid closer attention to how changes were sequenced and experienced by their teams. They talked about spacing out initiatives that previously would have landed at the same time, giving people room to adjust before moving on to the next stage of work.
Some leaders said they were spending more time observing how day-to-day tasks were actually carried out. Those conversations often revealed that tool sprawl shaped the work experience far more than they realized, adding steps, interruptions and context switching that hadn’t been visible from a purely strategic view.
Others mentioned building in short stabilization periods so teams could settle into new processes before the next set of updates. They found that giving people time to regain their footing helped reduce anxiety and improve follow-through.
A number of leaders also highlighted the role of clear communication. Acknowledging that change requires effort and that disruptions are expected — made it easier for employees to engage with the process instead of feeling caught off guard by it.
The disconnect that has to be resolved
CIOs continue to introduce tools because the business requires modernization. Employees continue to burn out because their work environment never reaches a steady state. Both realities are true, and they coexist inside the same organization.
Bridging the distance between them requires leaders to pay closer attention to the human conditions under which digital transformation unfolds. Not philosophically, but practically — in sequencing, in timing, in the expectations they set and in how they observe the day-to-day experience of the people who make these systems function.
As the pace of change accelerates, some CIOs are already rethinking the IT roadmap itself — shifting from long-range planning to more adaptive, continuously revisited models.
As we enter 2026, the CIOs who make this shift aren’t slowing down progress. They’re creating the conditions for progress to hold. They understand that tools don’t transform an organization unless the people responsible for them have enough capacity left to adapt, experiment and regain their footing.
Modernization will continue. The pace will not soften. But burnout isn’t inevitable. It’s a signal. It shows leaders where the strain lives — and where attention must go next in the new year.
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