What’s the Chief AI Officer’s role – and why is it critical now?

AI, in some form, has already landed on the doorstep of most businesses, whether they know it or not.

While ‘tech-orientated’ companies are the ones most obviously championing AI leadership roles currently, the impact of AI in the workplace is absolutely not confined to specialized tech businesses.

Although not the only AI game in town, Generative AI is front and center in terms of business focus.

You can think of this as using AI to take raw data (whether that’s the collected work of Taylor Swift, or thousands of candidate CVs) and making something new and immediately useful out of it, based on likely statistical probabilities.

So-called ‘GenAI’ has the potential to be very useful because it can work almost instantly at a huge scale. It can be focused on a specific task or problem, and then produce usable, tangible results – a great fit for thousands of everyday organizational tasks.

In all of this, the ‘people factor’ is important, because these are tasks supported and delivered by individuals and teams with accountabilities, competencies and careers built across key business processes.

Adoption of AI has deep implications for foundational organizational practices and principles.

As much as anything, this is why a role like ‘CAIO’ – Chief AI Officer – is important, and important now.

A measure of how important many organizations think the current AI revolution is by putting someone in a C-level role in order to make sense of it.

Isn’t AI all about tech?

If GenAI is about tools that work alongside our current IT and technology estate, isn’t this something that should fall to the CTO or the IT team to make sense of? The quick answer is no.

The CAIO’s role has as much in common with a Chief People Officer than a senior technologist (and I say this as a former head of technology!)

The most fundamental challenges presented by AI are not just about understanding and assimilating AI technologies themselves.

They also revolve around an organization’s people, its practices and the processes it delivers every day.

So where to focus? Working as a CAIO since June 2023, I think it’s useful to think about two fundamental dimensions where AI impacts the way everyday business works internally and externally.

Managing people, process and technology change with AI

A Chief AI Officer needs to think about people, and their knowledge and comfort levels around AI.

The CAIO has a key role enabling change and supporting it across the organization.

This means working with both a ‘cultural’ focus around AI as well as developing specific guidelines and guardrails around AI tools and how they are used.

How do you balance interest and excitement, with people who are enthusiastic, want to get involved, and experiment with new tools, whilst at the same time reassuring others and making them feel included as part of the journey?

GenAI is becoming a high profile tool to support everyday tasks.

Ensuring organization-wide AI literacy and training is an important foundation as businesses start to think and work in new ways, and move towards an ‘AI-first’ mindset.

Confusion and wariness around the AI journey are understandable, and the workforce as a whole will be impacted.

That means talking, training and listening are key facets of change management.

Think about the arrival of our old friend, the spreadsheet, as an analogy.

Back in the 1970’s accountants spent a huge amount of time calculating paper spreadsheets by hand. Then electronic spreadsheets came along. These spreadsheets didn’t make people instant accountants, or even better accountants. They just usefully got rid of a huge amount of busywork.

But by the ‘80s, if you were an accountant, and didn’t know how to use a spreadsheet, you were in trouble.

Just as important are the guidelines and guardrails a CAIO provides for staff.

These are important ‘nuts and bolts’ things like determining access to approved AI tools that can be used for work, and guidelines as to what types of data are permitted to be used with them.

These ensure the organization stays in line with regulations and especially privacy and data security concerns.

The CAIO also has a key role in focusing where and how AI is applied to the processes that underpin everyday business, manageably and in order to add value.

This means both establishing the strategic objectives for bringing AI into the business, and directing the build-out of capabilities against them.

Any business with an HR or finance team will contain functions that could potentially gain a benefit from GenAI – whether that’s supporting the creation of new job descriptions, screening and matching best candidates from hundreds of applications or personalizing the onboarding experience.

The critical need here is to undertake this in a planned, selective manner. How do you provide balance between efforts that end up being more important and more impactful than others, and others that are good learning experiences but ultimately don’t go anywhere?

Right now, that means focusing on augmenting and automating tasks within processes and making work more consistent and efficient, rather than wholesale replacement of end-to-end processes.

Human oversight remains a key foundation for superficially plausible AI outputs, whether that’s text, images or computer code that a business can trust.

Across all of this, it probably goes without saying, but leading on the selection and implementation of AI tools and technologies used across a company’s business units and functions is a large part of the CAIO’s role.

You might need an AI leader more than you think

There’s a lot more to what a Chief AI Officer delivers to a business, of course – in applying AI to the products and services a business offers to the market, for example, or how it engages with customers, and the experience it delivers to them.

There are equally strong ethical implications around AI practices that are increasingly emerging on a regular basis, and a likely raft of regulative legislation to understand, digest and codify within the business.

Permissions and guidelines around responsible and sensitive use all come into play here.

Put this all together, and one thing now seems clear: AI will change the face of work and the workplace.

Given this impact, having someone to steer the process feels like a ‘need to have’ not just a ‘nice to have’.