The board comes to you as a leader of your organization and says, "We need to bring AI into our company." Everybody at any type of leadership level has been hearing that for three, four, five years now.

So here is the question. What level do you bring somebody in at, and what title do you give them?

I've seen everything from chief AI officers, which we've helped a lot of companies hire over the last 18 months, to chief data officers to chief AI strategy officers. It's all over the board.

Like most titles, it's hard to know what the job entails or what the important parts of it are without knowing the scope of the role and the person you're bringing into it.

So do you need a chief AI officer? A lot of companies will end up with one, and it can be a great hire. The ones that get the most out of that seat get AI inside every function first, with an AI strategist working in each one.

High Level Takeaways

• A chief AI officer does best when AI already lives inside the functions. One sitting off to the side has to influence their way in.
• Start by getting each function leader up to speed on AI or putting an AI strategist next to them.
• When it's time to build, bring in an architect who understands technology, plus two builders who can build flows unique to your company.
• When the CAIO comes in to tie the functions together, give the seat real authority and a number to own.

The Board Said Bring AI In and Now Everyone Wants a Title

And this hire is everywhere now. IBM's 2026 CEO Study found 76 percent of the organizations it surveyed have a chief AI officer, up from 26 percent in 2025.

The companies at the top are going out and getting technology leadership too. McKinsey's Global Tech Agenda 2026 found 37 percent of top performers were hiring technology executives, compared with 19 percent of other companies. Nearly a third of respondents said their companies struggle with AI talent and capability gaps. That's what we saw when we pulled together more than 65 studies on the AI talent and execution gap.

Where I see a lot of the big companies go wrong is the shape of the role. They hire too big of a role, or they give somebody a role that sits outside the rest of the business and ask them to make the AI decisions from there.

Why a Standalone AI Executive Stalls

If you have a chief AI officer sitting outside the business and they're trying to get marketing and finance on board with all these AI initiatives, good luck, because they don't have the authority or the power to implement it inside the marketing organization or the finance organization. They have to influence, and that always leads to barriers. That's going to be a flow that's set up not for success, right?

AI has to be embedded into the organization, it has to be incented and it has to have KPIs.

Look at the money. In early 2025, IBM and the Dubai Future Foundation surveyed more than 600 chief AI officers or equivalents and found 61 percent control their organization's AI budget, which leaves close to four in ten who don't.

My team ran into this on a search for an AI center of excellence lead at a $20 billion distributor. They had strong data engineers. The gap was that nobody owned delivery, so nobody could get the business leaders and the data team pulling in the same direction. The fix was one person with the authority to make the call.

A Chief AI Officer on the Side Is a Chief Internet Officer

When the internet came along, one of the most important innovations of the last thousand years, you didn't have a chief internet officer in the company. You had a chief marketing officer who was now responsible for digital and e-commerce. It's the same thing with AI, right?

Most companies are trying to take AI piecemeal, fixing this flow or that function. The best companies are going to go back, look at all of their processes, rip them out and rethink things from first principles. If you just put AI on top of the processes you already have, you're doing the same thing, just faster.

And most companies aren't doing the ripping out part yet. Deloitte's State of AI in the Enterprise 2026 survey of more than 3,000 executives found only 30 percent of organizations are redesigning key processes around AI. Another 37 percent are using AI at a surface level with little or no change to the underlying process, which is the piecemeal approach I'm talking about.

Get AI Inside Every Function First

Look, AI is going to give your people the opportunity to be 10 times to 100 times more productive. It's shown up in coding quite a bit, but this is going to be the case for every function going forward.

So where does the value sit? BCG's 2025 study of 1,250 executives found 70 percent of AI's potential value is concentrated in core business functions like sales and marketing, manufacturing, supply chain and pricing, and IT holds a 13 percent share of AI value. Most of that value is in the functions your leaders already run every day, so that's where your AI people need to be.

The way I'd line it up is an AI executive in every function of the business, and over time that person blends into the business. Your chief marketing officer either gets up to speed on AI or brings in an AI strategist to work with them on how to implement AI in marketing. You'd do the same with your chief financial officer.

But bringing a chief AI officer in to go talk to your chief marketing officer, I don't know. To me that's just putting up a lot of walls that don't need to be there.

So when you're hiring for this and you want to get AI into your business, don't think about it the traditional way, where you say I need to bring in a chief blank or I need to bring in an executive. A lot of the time you can do this from a parallel perspective, or even from the bottom up, by making the leaders you already have AI savvy.

Take your CFO, because you don't want your chief financial officer relying on an AI czar for advice and guidance. You want your CFO to be AI savvy and understand the exact impact of putting AI into everything you do from a financial perspective, what the positives are and, more than anything, what the risks are and what governance needs to be in place. To me, that's how things evolve over time. I'd hand your CFO our enterprise AI readiness guide, which covers the guardrails and governance side.

Your CEO peers are seeing this too. PwC's 2026 Global CEO Survey of 4,454 CEOs found the ones reporting both cost and revenue gains from AI were two to three times more likely to have embedded AI extensively across products and services, demand generation and strategic decision-making.

What the Team Looks Like When It's Time to Build

The model we've used with clients starts with an architect. This is more of a functional leader, a strategist who understands technology, and then two builders who can build the flows that are unique to your company.

Most companies right now are relying on standard boilerplate models that already exist and trying to build on top of them. To me, this is a huge mistake.

The beauty of AI is the ability to get away from the boilerplate, from building things for the collective, and make it about the custom, the bespoke, the individual. You can only do that if you have somebody who's in your business and understands it.

Those builders can work on your own proprietary technology, like we do here at MSH. Or they can build on top of the technology you already have, like a Salesforce or a HubSpot or your ERP, whatever it may be. If you're already on Microsoft 365, we do Microsoft 365 Copilot consulting too.

Between our searches and our staffing work, we've placed everything from very top level chief AI officers to forward deployed engineers and everything in between. If you need the architect, that's what our AI architect recruitment team does.

For the builders, we do AI and ML engineer staffing and forward deployed engineer recruitment, plus AI and ML staff augmentation if you'd rather start on contract.

The full set of roles is laid out in our guide to building an AI team.

Hire People Who Have Done It at a Company Your Size

Bring in people who have done this at companies similar to you, either your industry or similar size. You don't want to be bringing in somebody from Meta if you're ABC Manufacturing in Topeka, Kansas.

You want somebody who understands how to work within a business like yours, how to get stakeholders on board and how to make people less afraid of what AI brings, and then how to show them the benefits and the power of it with a few initial use cases. The best people for this have done it over the last two, three, four years at companies your size or in your industry. They've had success they can replicate and bring with them. Having access to that kind of network and knowing who's good is really, really key.

The resume only tells 10 percent of the story. That's always been the case, and it's even more the case now, so you have to see them do the work.

For our own AI architect, we went with somebody we had put on site with a client who did a phenomenal job. Then we asked them to come in and help do something similar for our company.

When a Chief AI Officer Does Make Sense

In the near term, I'd bring a strategist into each function and look at it specific to your organization. Eventually, you may want to bring in somebody who can tie all those functions together. If you're going to use the chief AI officer title anywhere, that's the seat where I'd use it.

HSBC is a good example. When it announced its first chief AI officer in March 2026, it described the job as clear enterprise leadership for AI adoption, which is the tie-it-all-together seat I'm talking about.

The path I've seen most common into that seat is somebody who started in data for a very long time. If you're in data, you understand concepts like big data, data lakes and machine learning, and eventually those start to translate into AI, because what is AI if not a large set of data that you're able to access and put inference behind based on your prompts?

So when you do fill that seat, set it up right. IBM and the Dubai Future Foundation found organizations with a CAIO see 10 percent higher ROI on AI spend, and organizations where the CAIO drives a centralized or hub-and-spoke operating model can see 36 percent higher ROI on AI initiatives. Hub and spoke is pretty much what I've been laying out, right? The strategists sit inside the functions and one leader ties them together.

One CAIO search we ran was for a global steel producer spending about $40 million a year on outside AI consulting. The search moved once we reframed the role for the board as bringing that work in house, with a hard number on the cost they'd avoid. Over 24 months, annual outside AI consulting spend fell to $11 million, and models in production went from 4 to more than 60. That's what giving the seat a number to own looks like.

If that's the seat you need, start with how to hire a chief AI officer, or talk to us about a chief AI officer search as part of our executive search work.

Questions I Get About Hiring a Chief AI Officer

Should you hire a chief AI officer or a chief data officer?

Figure out the scope first, then pick the title. What I have seen is that people who spent years in big data, data lakes and machine learning are the ones who tend to grow into the chief AI seat, so a strong data leader can be your path there.

What does an AI strategist do?

An AI strategist sits inside a function, like marketing or finance, and works with that function's leader on how to implement AI there. Over time, that person blends into the business.

How should you start when the board wants AI now?

Start with your people before anything else. Find out whether you have people who are forward about AI and excited about it, and get everybody to the same baseline with training.

Then work function by function on the things you do every day and what you should rethink. Bring in the architect and builders after that. If you want help standing it up across several functions at once, that's what an AI center of excellence or an AI implementation partner does.

So Do You Need a Chief AI Officer?

A lot of you will, and it's a great seat to fill when it's set up right. I think the first part is understanding the function and having an AI expert in that space, with function leaders who understand the risks and the governance themselves.

If the board just asked you for AI, start with the leaders you already have. Get that right and the chief AI officer you bring in has something real to tie together.