Chief AI Officer For Global Steel Producer

The Solution

MSH Tech also had to solve a compensation and geography problem. The role was a newly created C-suite seat at a European industrial headquarters, competing for a profile that the technology sector pays aggressively for. The search moved when MSH reframed the role to the board as an insourcing mandate with a hard cost-avoidance number attached to it. That changed the band, and it changed who would take the call.

Candidates had to have run AI inside a physical operation, process, energy, mining, chemicals, automotive manufacturing. Org-building evidence. The Chief AI Officer had to hire roughly 140 people in two years, in a market where the client was not the obvious employer of choice. Every finalist was asked how they would wind down a nine-figure consulting relationship without losing the four things that actually worked. A candidate who had only ever shipped in a single-regulator market was a hiring risk. If the candidate could not hold that room, nothing else mattered.

The placed candidate came out of automotive manufacturing, where they had spent five years building an internal machine learning organization from a standing start inside a company that had also been consulting-dependent. That answer, unprompted, specific, unflattering, was the reason MSH advanced them over a more decorated slate.

“We will never again pay someone to build something we cannot maintain. That sentence is the entire strategy. Everything else is implementation.”

— Chief AI Officer