CIOs are drowning in AI market hype. While massive infrastructure investments and speculation about artificial general intelligence (AGI) dominate boardroom conversations, most firms lack the IT maturity to deploy AI safely or profitably. Vendor-driven fear of missing out fuels premature rollouts that destroy more value than they create. With or without AGI, AI will continue to advance — but successful AI deployment hinges on mature IT capabilities rather than better AI technology. To cut through the hype and retake control, this report shows CIOs how to use Forrester’s high-performance IT (HPIT) model to assess their maturity and build the alignment, adaptivity, and trust required to deploy AI safely at scale.