The hottest new job within the C-suite may be essentially the most difficult to fill and, finally, essentially the most endangered.
The point out of a chief artificial-intelligence officer elicits equal quantities of exuberance and eye rolls. It’s both essentially the most essential publish inside an organization or the least obligatory, in line with a cross part of business insiders contacted by MarketWatch.
“At 99% of companies, a CAIO creates overlap with the [chief technology officer] and [chief information officer]. Unless you’re a pure AI company or a really large organization, do you need a CAIO? Not really,” Bryan Wise, chief data officer at software program firm 6Sense, mentioned in an interview.
Tensions with the chief expertise officer and chief data officer over ambiguous strains of accountability have lengthy dogged the function of chief information officer, and that is also true for a CAIO, contends Nick Elprin, co-founder and chief govt of Domino Data Lab, a supplier of enterprise AI software program. Unless organizations make deep structural adjustments, he warns, there will probably be a CAIO exodus within the subsequent 18 months.
Ashley Kramer, chief technique and advertising and marketing officer at GitLab Inc.
GTLB,
which offers code-hosting and collaboration-platform companies, doesn’t see the CAIO function as a long-term one. “As we saw with the rise and fall of the chief cloud officer position more than a decade ago, the popularity of the CAIO role will be temporary,” she mentioned. “As AI technology matures and becomes more of a standard across businesses, eventually, CIOs and CTOs will be responsible for their organizations’ AI strategies, just as they are for cloud strategies today.”
However, self-described AI anthropologist Cliff Jurkiewicz is satisfied that the function will “grow over time” and that there will probably be a “separation of powers” with different govt positions.
“You can’t lump it into the roles of a CTO and CIO,” he mentioned.
But hiring a professional candidate is proving to be a problem amid a rush by practically each giant firm to money in on the generative-AI craze.
“They are impossible to find, but they are indispensable as we shift from digital transformation to exponential transformation,” mentioned David Mathison, chair and CEO of the CAIO Summit, which was held for the primary time final yr in Boston. Among the summit’s targets helps to coach and practice chief AI officers by way of certificates packages.
The dearth of certified candidates is a serious purpose some huge companies are keen to fork over a seven-figure wage bundle to land a chief AI officer, Mathison mentioned.
The median wage for a private-sector CAIO is about $300,000, in line with Glassdoor’s database.
“AI is the next evolution of cloud computing,” mentioned Reid Christian, basic associate at CRV, a Silicon Valley venture-capital agency. “When we look back 10 years from now, every digital product is going to have AI as a part of it. It isn’t just about one hire. Your whole organization needs to be oriented around AI.”
But at the same time as organizations look to harness the transformative expertise, many executives consider the place is an pointless one that can solely muck up their firm’s organizational chart and result in C-suite turf wars.
“Companies don’t need a chief AI officer,” David Berkowitz, founding father of the AI Marketers Guild, mentioned in an interview. ”The function could be a short-term repair, however it can go the best way of the chief metaverse officer, chief digital officer or chief innovation officer.”
He continued: “AI affects everyone’s role and job, so one person alone can’t manage that. Each business segment — marketing, sales, customer support, HR, legal, R&D — they all need folks with AI expertise.”
And whereas some organizations would possibly require somebody to jump-start an AI program, the job goes far past a single particular person. “AI isn’t a solo sport,” Greg Verdino, founding father of CognitivePath Research, a analysis and advisory agency, mentioned in an e-mail. “So it’s also worth considering the creation of a multi-stakeholder, cross-functional AI leadership council or center of excellence rather than vesting authority into an individual.”
The CAIO stampede
The Silicon Valley parlor sport over the deserves of getting a CAIO belie the stampede by corporations to search out somebody to assist map their AI technique.
Tech corporations, regulation corporations, hospitals, insurance coverage corporations, authorities companies and universities are baking AI into tasks starting from chatbots that may assist write pc code and analyze buyer information to automated auditing processes.
But solely 27% of three,400 C-suite execs mentioned their corporations are able to scale up with generative AI, in line with a latest Accenture survey.
Mathison estimates that worldwide, there are about 300 individuals with the CAIO title at main organizations — these with at the very least $100 million in annual gross sales — and he says the urge for food for them is rising.
In a latest search on LinkedIn for the title “chief AI officer,” Mathison discovered 781 outcomes amongst main corporations, in contrast with 600 such ends in 2023, 500 in 2022, 400 in 2021 and 250 in 2020.
Among the most important corporations with CAIOs are SAP
SAP,
Dell Technologies Inc.
DELL,
eBay Inc.
EBAY,
and Zscaler Inc.
ZS,
Philipp Herzig, who has years of engineering expertise in information mining, cloud computing and deep studying, grew to become SAP’s first CAIO on Jan. 1. His function, wherein he works carefully with the chief expertise officer and chief design officer, is taken into account essential for constructing AI capabilities into the corporate’s merchandise and for his or her commercialization. “This is core to what SAP does,” he mentioned in an interview. “We are all in on AI.”
At Dell, Jeff Boudreau has collaborated carefully with the corporate’s chief expertise officer and chief data officer since he grew to become Dell’s first CAIO 4 months in the past. “This [CAIO post] is Dell’s top priority of the year,” Boudreau mentioned, and one that can enable the corporate to “define and refine” an AI technique.
“If I do my job, I may become chief productivity officer at some future date,” he mentioned.
“If a business is AI-first, this is a necessary role,” mentioned Dan O’Connell, CAIO and chief technique officer at Dialpad Inc., an AI-powered customer-intelligence platform. “Otherwise, this role is shared among the chief product officer and [chief technology officer].”
But even AI execs acknowledge that the CAIO publish is probably not round without end. “CAIO is not a long-term title beyond three to five years. But it is incredibly important for organizations to decide,” Steve Chase, vice chair of KPMG’s Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation group, mentioned in an interview.
Mathison famous that the Biden administration is including CAIO positions all through the federal government — final yr, greater than 400 federal departments and companies have been searching for CAIOs to adjust to an govt order by President Joe Biden that aimed to create safeguards across the expertise.
“In three to five years, those companies addressing CAIO right now will be well ahead of everyone else,” Mathison mentioned.
Ed Wiley, a generative-AI enterprise teacher at online-learning platform Udacity Inc., mentioned a June 2023 search on LinkedIn returned 11,000 people with the title of chief information officer and 423 with the title of chief AI officer. In February 2024, he discovered there have been round 12,000 chief information officers and greater than 2,600 CAIOs.
Some argue that an organization ought to have a chief privateness officer in place earlier than hiring a CAIO and coping with the attendant regulatory and moral problems with utilizing the expertise. “Companies must first ensure that their privacy practices are robust and forward-looking, laying the groundwork for the responsible and ethical use of AI,” Bill Porter, head of selling at Privaini, an India-based firm that gives digital-privacy software program, mentioned in an e-mail.
“A director-level position overseeing regulatory adherence, keeping the company abreast of opportunities, should probably be enough [for AI],” social-media strategist Michael Durwin mentioned. “After all, almost every company has been using some form of AI for over a decade at this point.“
But executives remain split on whether a CAIO is a necessity or an albatross.
“AI is advancing at such a pace that there is absolutely a need for a senior AI role within organizations,” mentioned Hitesh Sheth, CEO of cybersecurity firm Vectra AI.
Meanwhile, Casey Ellis counters that argument. “I’m not convinced that too many organizations need a chief AI officer,” mentioned Ellis, who’s founder and chief technique officer at Bugcrowd, an IT safety firm. “The variety of bigger organizations the place AI is, in follow, part of the core technique remains to be comparatively small.“
Source web site: www.marketwatch.com
