Charlotte, N.C., Requires AI, Cloud Certifications for IT Staff

The structure of public-sector IT is changing. Faced with tight budgets, an urgent need to ramp up artificial intelligence, and ever-present concerns around cybersecurity, state and local IT leaders are re-evaluating their skills mix.

In the realm of nuts and bolts, the move to cloud and software as a service is reshaping the IT organization. “You had a whole cadre of mainframe developers and mainframe system admins, and now your mainframe is virtual. That’s been a big shift,” said National Association of State Chief Information Officers Executive Director Doug Robinson. Add to this a growing emphasis on enterprise-scale solutions and the rapid emergence of AI. All that together impacts how IT is organized.

At a higher level, “the major evolution is the move from the CIO being a technology expert — a boxes-and-wires, green-blinking-lights kind of person — to being someone who leads change in the organization,” Robinson said. As change agents, CIOs are looking to align their organizational structures with both the emerging technology tools and the practical needs within their jurisdictions.

To understand how that’s done and where things are headed, GovTech convened a virtual roundtable of city and county IT leaders. Here we talk to Markell Storay, CIO of Charlotte, N.C., with a population of 943,000. Read the other four CIOs’ responses here:

• Jonathan Behnke, CIO, San Diego
• Laurel Caldwell, CIO, Latah County, Utah
• Scott Furman, CIO, Chesterfield County, Va.
• Chris Seidt, CIO, Louisville, Ky.

Give me a rough breakdown of your IT organization today. How do you think that will change?
Markell Storay: Cyber, apps and infrastructure make up close to a third of the staff. Then there’s project management and data. I hired a chief data officer almost two years ago in preparation for all the AI work that’s coming up. As technology is moving from on-prem to cloud, we’ve actually brought in a company to upskill our staff on programming skills like Python and AI and cyber and data, to make sure we’re keeping up with the latest and greatest technology in support of our businesses.

What role(s) in your org do you think have the most potential for change in the coming years?
Storay: Moving from on-prem to cloud, you won’t need those hands-on-keyboard database administrators and system admins, since all that work will be done in the cloud. With that said, there are cloud proficiencies that those individuals would need to pick up; they’ll need to get certified in cloud in order to support the organization. From an AI perspective, that’s going to change holistically how we do business, especially in the app space. I’m requiring all of my staff to have AI certifications along with cloud certifications.

How will AI impact how you hire?
Storay: If you would have told me five years ago that prompt engineers would exist, I would have said, “What’s a prompt engineer?” Today that’s a job. I mentioned we hired a chief data officer two years ago, and now we’re actually hiring some individuals with AI experience, not only from a technology perspective, but from a governance and guardrail perspective. That will be needed as the use of AI becomes ingrained across all our different business lines.

What are the drawbacks and benefits of incorporating AI into the IT workforce?
Storay: There’s concern for us around the guardrails — the safety and cybersecurity piece. That’s why we’re really focusing on our policies: what those guardrails look like, what those frameworks look like. The plus here is being able to work more efficiently, to streamline some of our processes. That’s the human side, but there are also the AI agents. These agents are actually employees as well, and you have to manage them and monitor them. As you onboard AI agents, you have to have some type of monitoring or orchestration to “manage” all of these agents.

The most recent Digital Cities (2025), Counties (2025) and States (2024) surveys* reported that cybersecurity, compliance auditing, AI modeling and data analytics are the areas with the greatest need for increased IT staffing. Is that true of your organization?
Storay: That’s absolutely on par. Cyber and data go hand in hand, and you can’t do AI without data. You have got to have data first, you need cyber to secure it, and then you can bring in the AI piece to do some of the functionality. Risk and IT compliance goes hand in hand with the data piece overall, from a governance perspective.

*The Digital Cities, Counties and State surveys are conducted by the Center for Digital Government, which is part of e.Republic, Government Technology’s parent company.