AI’s growing power demands and grid instability are turning electricity from a background utility into a strategic risk that directly threatens uptime, security, and business continuity.Ann Dunkin, a four-time enterprise CIO, including the U.S. Department of Energy and EPA, and Distinguished Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, outlined how energy reliability now belongs on the CIO agenda alongside cybersecurity and operational resilience. She called for elevating energy into strategic risk registers, sharing ownership across teams, and rethinking data center placement by moving data to where reliable power already exists.