At the beginning of 2025, David Khuat-Duy pulled off the ultimate never let them know your next move trick. Stepping down from a quarter-century stint as CEO of Ivalua, the spend-management software company he founded in 2000, he ventured off into a new role within the company—not as a strategic advisor as some may expect, but instead as chief AI officer (CAIO).
For Khuat-Duy, the transition into Ivalua’s inaugural CAIO role made perfect sense. As he told IT Brew, the emergence of ChatGPT signaled a disruption similar or even larger than the one following the rise of the internet. While Khuat-Duy had already begun to spend time focusing on AI technology, he said he ultimately felt it was time to make it the center of his attention.
“Because I was CEO and because I know very well the process, the organization, and all the leaders, I was the best person to help the company embrace that technology at its full extent,” Khuat-Duy said. (In January, Ivalua CRO Franck Lheureux succeeded Khuat-Duy as CEO as the latter transitioned into the AI-focused role.)
A day in the life of a CAIO. Since taking on the CAIO title in January, Khuat-Duy has kept himself busy. While he previously spent time growing his team and managing Ivalua’s operations, now he works more closely with his research and development team to enhance Ivalua’s framework around agents.
“I really focused the first eight months on building a framework where people can build their own agent,” Khuat-Duy said. “So, each employee of the company can build their own agent based on the data of the company.”
Not your average CAIO. Prior to taking on the CAIO role, Khuat-Duy—who has a PhD in math—said he was (and still is) a developer at heart. Ivalua has had an AI team for years, but it wasn’t until ChatGPT came out that he began to focus more on it.
“As soon as it was released, I spent almost most of my time learning more about it,” he said.
Khuat-Duy said one does not need to be an AI expert to take on the CAIO role. In fact, he thinks having advanced knowledge on AI could potentially be a hindrance.
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“I feel if you’re [a] full expert in AI, it could disserve you because you have such a background of advanced expertise in AI and building [models] that this is what you like,” Khuat-Duy said. “Whereas here, it’s not about building a model. It’s about using the model and [integrating] them, which is a different skill set.”
Ema Roloff, co-founder and chief growth officer of Roloff Consulting, a digital strategy advisory firm, said companies seeking a CAIO are likely to look for candidates with a background in data science or skills related to the AI solution they wish to build. She told IT Brew she hadn’t heard of the CEO to CAIO transition before (neither had Khuat-Duy), but said it was an “odd switch” only because a CEO can also be a “digitally literate leader.”
“You can be a leader of a company who is aware of the technology, understanding the potential and helping set the vision for where you want the company to go using artificial intelligence…without having to pivot and change to have a role that’s specifically pointed at AI,” Roloff said.
Crystal ball. R “Ray” Wang, founder, chair, and principal analyst at the technology research and advisory firm Constellation Research, told IT Brew in July that he believes the CAIO position is a “transitional role” that will eventually get absorbed into the CIO or other business technology roles. When asked if he foresees the CAIO role as a temporary position at Ivalua, Khuat-Duy didn’t have a clear answer.
“To be honest. I don’t know what the world will be in five years from now because the disruption is so big,” Khuat-Duy said.
In the next year, Khuat-Duy said he will focus on making sure Ivalua employees and customers are benefitting from agents. He added that learning and being open to experimentation are important to him in his role.
“We work, we learn, we test, we experiment, and that for me [is] the motto I have everyday,” Khuat-Duy said. “That’s how we’ll be successful.”