2026 Chief Nursing Executive Priorities Snapshot

Nursing leaders see AI’s clinical potential — but it has not yet translated into strategic focus.

AI strategy ranks 4th overall for CNOs/CNEs, yet nursing-specific AI applications — such as leveraging AI for clinical quality improvement and nursing practice transformation — rank 13th and 14th as strategic priorities. This gap suggests nursing leaders recognize AI’s relevance to frontline care but may lack the resources, infrastructure, or cross-functional alignment needed to prioritize these use cases today.

CNOs are the most operations-focused leaders in the C-suite. Improving patient access and operational efficiencies both score 4.8 — the highest ratings across CXO roles for those priorities. These rankings reflect the reality that nursing is in many ways the operational backbone of the enterprise, sitting at the center of health system throughput, care coordination, and daily operations. Their emphasis on throughput optimization, revenue capture, and care coordination reflects a nursing leadership identity that extends well beyond traditional clinical oversight into enterprise-level operational accountability.

Workforce is nursing's greatest solved problem — but patient affordability is their biggest gap. CNOs/CNEs report the strongest performance of any CXO group on strengthening the workforce (1.7, the lowest improvement-needed score across all executives), signaling that the nursing staffing crisis has meaningfully eased. Yet patient affordability ranks dead last (24th) as a strategic priority while being the number one improvement opportunity, representing the widest priority-to-performance gap on the entire list. This disconnect may reflect that affordability falls outside nursing's traditional domain, but it signals an area where CNOs could expand their influence.