The case against hiring a Chief AI Officer

If you're a business looking to adopt and succeed with AI in 2024, the worst thing you can do is appoint a Chief AI Officer.

Yes the Chief AI Officer, or Head of AI is slated to be the hottest leadership role in 2024, and investments in AI are expected to grow exponentially while everything else stays flat.

But hear me out.

I've been researching digital transformation for the last ten years, and if there's one thing I can tell you, it's that companies who reported successful digital transformations didn't "outsource" it to a single leader or function.

Back in the day we saw the proliferation of chief digital officers as the hottest leadership role to have. Today, only 19% of companies say the CDO is leading their digital transformation (Altimeter's 2023 State of Digital Transformation). Because ultimately, every part of the company becomes "digital" and it no longer makes sense to have a CDO.

AI is the same. Every single part of the business will rely on AI. It's not a new function or discipline unto itself. It's an innovation that will help our existing functions and disciplines perform faster, better and cheaper. Having a Chief AI Officer would be akin to having a "Chief Internet Officer."

The same Altimeter report also showed that the vast majority of companies (70%) implemented a holistic transformation program. This means transformation efforts took place across many functions at the same time, instead of being implemented by a central transformation team or leader.

A Chief AI Officer is likely set up to fail because it shouldn't be the responsibility (or the capability) of a single person to implement AI technology throughout an organization. No single person has the functional expertise to develop a winning AI strategy across marketing, sales, service, product, supply chain, HR, accounting, cybersecurity and every other discipline or practice.

At best, a Chief AI Officer will improve the functions they are closest to (Data, Analytics, IT) while having minimal impact on others. At worst, they'll be made scapegoats for the company's slow adoption of innovative practices.

A better approach would be to entrust the leaders of each of those functions to develop their own AI strategy and guardrails, and share their learnings with each other in a working group or committee.

That may not sound as convincing to investors or a board of directors as a newly appointed AI czar, but the data shows its the best way to keep everyone accountable, and ensure a uniform culture of innovation, rather than creating laggards and winners within the same company.

If you really are going to entrust the implementation of AI to a single leader, then make sure that leader is the CEO.