Do You Need a Chief AI Officer Here Is How the Tech Is Changing Boardrooms

Since the debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022 and the subsequent AI revolution workers across industries have been hit by sweeping layoffs A new report published by IBM last week however shows that AI is also reshaping boardrooms and how CEOs make decisions The report says 76 percent of the more than 2000 organizations surveyed have established a new executive office that of the chief AI officer CAIO up from 26 percent in 2025 Analysts and experts have expressed concerns over the possibility of a labor crisis arising from the proliferation of AI across the corporate sphere AI is driving what may be the largest organizational shift since the industrial and digital revolutions Vivek Lath partner at McKinsey and Company told CNBC The IBM report also found that AI was deepening the influence of one of the C suite’s most established portfolios with 59 percent of respondents expecting the influence of the chief human resources officer CHRO to grow Blurred lines As AI has matured the question of its ownership in the boardroom has led to an increasingly confusing picture The existing roster of tech facing roles like the chief technology officer chief information officer and chief data officer has often introduced ambiguity over AI responsibility at the executive level according to Lian Jye Su chief analyst from market research firm Omdia So with the emergence of challenges specific to AI adoption questions of infrastructure governance integration and workflow modernization firms have increasingly begun establishing a dedicated office in the CAIO to oversee AI transformations Su said This year alone organizations like HSBC and Lloyds Banking Group have made the move to staff the role But estimates of how many companies are appointing CAIOs vary widely Have we seen chief AI officers Yes Do I expect that to go mainstream No probably not Jonathan Tabah an advisory director at consultancy firm Gartner said Organizations that have appointed CAIOs have chosen to be at the forefront of this innovation Tabah said adding that creating new C suite roles often carries significant costs ones that not every company can justify or afford But the emergence of the CAIO role according to Hans Dekkers IBM’s Asia Pacific general manager reflects a sense that AI is no longer just a technology initiative While the CIO CTO and Chief Data Officer each play critical roles in technology innovation infrastructure and data management the CAIO’s remit is focused on how AI is applied across the enterprise to change how work decisions and execution happen he said IBM wrote in their report that CAIOs can enable calculated risk taking across the organization while setting clear AI transformation targets and guidelines that let teams accelerate without spinning out of control McKinsey sees the responsibility of ensuring centralized coordination of AI efforts across a company as being more important than the creation of a specific title Lath said But the mandate of offices like that of the CAIO often varies across organizations and typically evolves with time according to Randy Bean industry advisor and author of the 2026 AI and Data Leadership Executive Benchmark Survey The real question according to Bean is whether the nascent CAIO role will be transitional which might then be folded into other executive portfolios once AI transformations mature or a more permanent one The human resource question The chief HR officer is uniquely positioned to influence talent management acquisition and training processes within the organization Omdia’s Su said adding that employee AI literacy is often a key hurdle for most firms Similarly in Bean’s 2026 AI and Data Leadership survey 93 point 2 percent of his respondents cited cultural challenges rather than technological limitations as the principal hurdle to AI adoption Analysts like Gartner’s Tabah see AI’s automation potential as a chance to push HR departments toward more strategic roles This is an opportunity to finally unburden HR departments with operational work and to step up and be strategic leaders he said But Tabah also warned that the opposite is possible If HR in your organization is not strategic and is predominantly an operational function it will be pushed into a more operational function it will become more automated More salient however may be how executives address the human impacts of AI led job disruptions In the short term I expect the high level executive roles to face the least disruption they are the most insulated from AI Tabah said That does not mean they are absolved from responsibility for knowing how to implement or to drive its implementation but in terms of the impact on their immediate jobs they will be most insulated C suite roles however frequently resist straightforward codification tasks like strategic judgments and stakeholder management are harder to outsource to AI algorithms The other part of the answer is C suite executives have the most control over where AI impact is felt so therefore they have the most ability to protect themselves from disruption Tabah added Year to date more than 101000 tech employees have been laid off around the world according to estimates by Layoffs dot fyi With more than 20000 job cuts reported across firms like Meta and Microsoft in April analysts have begun seeing these layoffs as a sign of things to come On Thursday Bain and Company published a report estimating that software as a service firms some of the hardest hit by new AI capabilities stood to reap margins of nearly 100 billion dollars by converting labor costs into software spending by automating coordination work We are not suggesting that there is not a labor impact I think we are just saying that the world does not need another voice talking about that without putting a context of the positive that is being done which is that there is more work being done freeing people up to do other things David Crawford management consultant from Bain told CNBC Does your company have a chief AI officer How is AI changing your boardroom Share your thoughts in the comments