By Steve Urban
A lot of companies answered the AI question this year by adding a title.
IBM's Institute for Business Value surveyed 2,000 CEOs for a study it released in May, and found that 76 percent of their organizations now have a chief AI officer, up from 26 percent the year before. Bloomberg ran a feature this week built around the same question that keeps coming up in boardrooms: who in the C-suite is actually in charge of AI?
I understand why the title is popular. I have also spent enough years running operations to know that a new box on the org chart is not the same thing as a decision about who is accountable. Those are two different questions, and a lot of companies are answering the first one and assuming they have answered the second.
The argument for the role is a good one, and it deserves a fair hearing.
AI touches everything at once. Finance, HR, operations, sales, legal, IT. Without someone at the top coordinating it, you get ten departments buying ten tools, nobody watching data or security, and no shared view of what is working. A senior leader with a mandate can set standards, kill duplicate spending, negotiate with vendors from strength, and make sure the CEO hears about AI from someone who understands it.
There is also a signaling benefit. Naming a senior owner tells the organization this is a priority, not a side project for whoever is curious.
All of that is real. I would not argue against having someone senior coordinate AI. My concern is what happens next.
The failure mode I worry about is simple. Once there is a chief AI officer, everyone else gets to treat AI as somebody else's job.
The head of operations stops asking how AI should change the way work moves through the plant, because that is the AI person's area. The CFO waits for the AI team to bring a business case instead of asking what close would look like with better tools. Sales leaders wait for a rollout. The person with the title ends up owning a strategy deck, a vendor list, and a governance policy, while the people who own the actual P&Ls stay at arm's length.
That is backwards. AI does not create value in the abstract. It creates value inside a specific workflow, owned by a specific leader, measured against a specific number. In every turnaround I have been part of, the change that stuck was the one owned by the person running the operation, not the one owned by a central team presenting to them.
I have seen the same thing with every wave of new technology in my career. ERP rollouts that IT owned and operations tolerated. Quality programs that lived in a quality department and never reached the floor. The title was there. The ownership was not.
If you have a chief AI officer, or you are thinking about one, here is how I would draw the lines.
The AI leader owns the platform. Standards, security, data access, vendor relationships, training, and the shared tools everyone uses. That is a real job and it needs a real leader.
Business leaders own the outcomes. Each functional head names the workflows in their area where AI should change the result, owns the target, and reports on it like any other operating number.
The CEO owns the tradeoffs. Where to invest, what to stop, and how fast to move. Those calls cannot be delegated to a single function.
Every AI initiative has one name on it. Not a committee. One person who will be asked, in the weekly rhythm, whether it is working.
IBM's own study points the same direction. It found that organizations that redesigned core functions like finance, HR, and operations were about four times more likely to meet their business objectives. That is not a title finding. It is an ownership finding.
Most businesses I work with will never hire a chief AI officer, and they do not need one. At Riderflex and Robo Reliance, the question is the same, just smaller. Who on the team owns making sure a given tool actually changes how we work? If the answer is "whoever is most interested in AI," that is not ownership. That is a hobby.
In a smaller company, the CEO or COO usually has to play the platform role personally, at least early on. Pick the tools, set the guardrails, and then hand each workflow to the person who already owns that part of the business.
If you want to test where your company stands, try this. Pick your three most important operating metrics. For each one, ask who is responsible for using AI to move it, and what has changed in the last ninety days because of it.
If the answers all point to the same person with "AI" in their title, you have a coordinator. You do not yet have a strategy.
The title is fine. Just do not let it become the place where accountability goes to hide.
Connect with Steve: linkedin.com/in/stevepurban
Photo: Mapbox on Unsplash