Ansible 2.1 is scheduled to ship with NTLM authentication support (when paired with an updated version of pywnirm)- this *should* work on a CIS-hardened image correctly. There are coordinated changes we've been making to a number of upstream projects (pywinrm, requests_ntlm, requests_kerberos) that need to be in place for this support to "light up", but hopefully all will be released around the same time (unfortunately, mostly outside our control).
Keep an eye out for the release of Ansible 2.1 and on our Windows guide page at
http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/intro_windows.html - we'll update the documentation there on how to use NTLM once all the required upstream project updates are publicly released. Should be a matter of weeks, but can't give a more concrete date than that right now.
-Matt Davis
Principal Software Engineer, Ansible Core (Windows)