Step aside buddy, there’s a new cowboy C-suite role in town.
Chief AI officers (CAIOs), executives who oversee a company’s overall AI strategy, are all the rage these days. General Motors, the University of Utah, and Raymond James are just a few of the organizations that opted to add a CAIO to their C-suite this year. Data and intelligence company Altrata examined roughly 35,000 US public and private companies and found that 25 new CAIO and AI-related leadership positions have been created in 2025 so far.
R “Ray” Wang, founder, chair, and principal analyst at the technology research and advisory firm Constellation Research, told IT Brew that the rapid pace of AI innovation will require companies to have someone at the helm of the tech in order to be successful.
“Every organization is going to need a person to coordinate AI projects, whether that’s the chief AI officer or whether it’s someone that’s taking the same responsibility to that chief AI officer,”Wang said. “If your company doesn’t have anyone focused on AI at this moment, you will cease to exist in five years.”
This town isn’t big enough for the both of us! Some digital transformation experts, however, aren’t completely sold on the need for the novel C-suite member. Ema Roloff, co-founder and chief growth officer of Roloff Consulting, a digital strategy advisory firm, told IT Brew that companies “actively developing AI solutions” may find having a CAIO who can oversee their AI development strategy beneficial to their business.
But for other companies that don’t have AI products as part of their go-to-market strategy, a CAIO may not be necessary, as their CTO and CIO might already have the same skillset. IT Brew previously reported that 40% of technology leaders worried that the CAIO may take over the responsibilities of the CIO.
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“In a lot of companies, at least from what I’m seeing, [it’s] a rebrand of the same type of technology leadership,” Roloff said.
Avoiding the silo effect. Roloff added that companies hiring a CAIO isn’t a magic bullet. If companies hire a CAIO to treat AI as a “separate entity” from the rest of their technology strategy, they may experience unintended consequences.
“When you separate one tool out from all of the other tools that you’re using to execute against a strategy, that’s going to be when you start to have disjointed systems within the company,” she said.
Randy Bean, senior advisor, founder, and CEO of Data & AI Leadership Exchange, added that some companies are currently “chasing the shiny object” by adding the CAIO to their organization.
“Hiring a chief AI officer without a long-term, thought-through strategy is more likely to tank your company,” Bean said.
Here for a good time, not a long time. While CAIOs may be the new kids on the block, some believe that it is a transitional role, similar to the chief digital officer role in the early 2000s, and will cease to exist in the near future.
“We see it as a temporary role,” Wang said. “[T]hat transitional role is really a three-to-five-year period, which then gets subsumed to other parts of the CIO role or whatever you’re doing with business technology.”