When history reflects on 2024, it may be seen as the year the new Industrial Revolution took hold. CIOs with strong leadership skills and investment discipline are crucial in times of global transformation. This year has required evaluating new industries, markets and trends at a time when certain durable performance trends waned, while others emerged and matured in institutional portfolios.

Navigating the challenges of investing while recruiting, developing and retaining talent continued to challenge CIOs everywhere alongside the ongoing mega-trends of artificial intelligence, demographic change, the energy transition and political realignment. It had been crucial to divine corrections from recalibrations and determine how best to divide a risk budget among potential newer sources of return, like private credit, and the most conservative and again remunerative—cash and sovereign debt.

Leadership is always most critical in changing times. In 2024, as higher interest rates made the real economy more important, it became important for allocators to consider opportunities in real economy assets, including infrastructure, energy and technology. CIOs have had to guide funds, use their authority and insight to drive investment results, while not being lulled into complacency by the strength of equity market returns. The need to collaborate and bring new ideas to light remains as important as ever.

Leadership takes on many forms. This year, for our annual Power 100 list of CIO allocators, we found it in flexibility, political savvy, assets under management and change-making.

Many CIOs continue to maintain calm and guide their organizations through tough choices about public and private markets and so much more.

There are few comparables when measuring against political or board mandates in a universe that spans different regions and the gamut of public pensions, corporate pensions, endowments, foundations and sovereign wealth funds. Risk appetites, as well as return-filing deadlines, vary per plan and per plan type, so the AUM figures we offer represent a ballpark figure of the funds’ current assets.

Tenure, for this list, was rounded up to the nearest year, and our list focuses on people who have been in their posts for at least one year. In most cases, we have left those who retired during the year off this list, although we do wish them well. Also in most cases, we did not feature their replacements on the list; we want the new arrivals to have time to settle in. It is an alphabetical list.

It is no simple task to foresee the future.

Yet in reviewing our Power 100 list, it is clear: Those who have made it to the CIO seat and on this 2024 list mostly, and perhaps crucially, continue to guide their funds through myriad challenges the world throws at them and are disciplined enough to navigate whatever is ahead. Eleanor Roosevelt said, “Good leaders inspire people to have confidence in their leader. Great leaders inspire people to have confidence in themselves.”

These CIOs are the ones leading by building teams that will continue to serve their missions and beneficiaries regardless of market or investment environment, even as the names on this list change.

—Amy Resnick, Executive Editor, CIO