Do You Need A Chief AI Officer?

Imagine it’s 1997 and your company is deciding whether it needs an internet strategy. That’s sort of where we are with gen AI today. Except with one big difference. In the early days of the web, a non-technical business leader would not be able to just speak a website into existence; nor would your internet strategy be anywhere near the minds of your CHRO as a potential workflow transformation process. 

The arrival and speed of development of today’s AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and the like require a different approach than prior tech waves when it comes to adoption, leverage and scale. 

In our client work and research, we kept seeing the same pattern: Organized thinking about applying gen AI is scattered across departments, often treated like an IT project or just doesn’t exist. Without a senior leader owning that transformation, the organization will have a tough time keeping up, doing the right kinds of experimentation, and the work never has the right footing to take hold and propel the organization to another level.

This is a leadership moment and opportunity for the CEO of a company. Just the act of naming a single person to lead a proper, organized process for transforming a company into an AI first organization shows a mindset and sets the tone for the rest of the organization.

This isn’t a one-size-fits-all recommendation. Not every company needs a literal “CAIO” today. But if you are serious about becoming “AI First,” someone must be empowered to drive the vision, prioritize opportunities, and lead an AI council to ensure ethical, scalable implementation. That’s what a dedicated “AI leader” can do.  

The question of whether companies and organizations should be creating a new position for a chief AI officer is complicated by the fact that this is so new and is moving so fast that you ­don’t want to get delayed and distracted by what would likely be a multi-month ­process to scope out and bring in an AI leader. We have seen this movie play out too many times; where a com­pany needs a functional overhaul but wants to wait ­until just the right leader is in place, and thereby loses months of time and opportunity costs. In the case of a chief AI officer, if you have done the requisite education and training of the members of an AI council, and that council has a chairperson, then you have at least an acting chief AI officer in that chairperson, for starters.

So, for the chair of the AI council (or AI champions team) or the like, what does your first 100 days on the job look like? For starters, if you are like Brice Challamel (Moderna’s VP of AI products and platform), you run your own transformational playbook around listening tours, understanding deeply the goals, challenges and structural issues around ­every single department of the company; and from ­there develop a robust program for rolling out AI education and engagement to the ­whole com­pany, leading to a champions team and the cataloging of use cases. But for most new AI officers (­whether chief AI officer or chair of the AI council), the first 100 days is likely ­going to be a bit more tactical and should have the following goals:

• Make sure ­there is a scalable AI education and literacy “academy” available to the company in some form, and ensure that a critical mass (at least a core handful of cross-­ functional leaders; an AI council) has gone through some sort of boot camp and education. (And make sure ­there is a mandate and mechanism for this group to constantly stay updated on the latest developments in the AI world.)
  
  
• Set up an AI use policy, review/update ­others in existence, and create a mechanism for the AI council to administer this policy on an ongoing basis.
  
  
• Create a literal or virtual AI Lab made up of ­either the council itself, or a designated group of other cross-­functional team members, whose mandate is both to ensure that a comprehensive AI impact assessment and road-­map initiative is underway and being project managed and also to make itself available to each and ­ every function and business unit of the company to help augment problem solving on top challenges and opportunities. This ­will likely encompass what comes up in the AI impact assessment and roadmap process, but is also meant to be available for ad hoc issues that come up (large and small).
  
  
• The chief AI officer also needs to do something that is hard to be prescriptive around: they need to be the chief transformational officer of the com­pany for the moment, and that involves being an incredibly good listener, garnering trust and credibility from the entire company. One of Stephen Covey’s seven habits is “first seek to understand, and then seek to be understood.” It’s why Brice Challamel’s listening tour at Moderna was so successful. It’s the art of being an effective change agent, and it’s perhaps the number one success ­factor in the first 100 days for anyone in the lead on AI transformation at an organization.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Adapted from AI FIRST:The Playbook for a Future-Proof Business and Brand by Adam Brotman and Andy Sack. Copyright 2025 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.