Do companies need a chief artificial intelligence officer today?

As the artificial intelligence industry accelerates, chief artificial intelligence officer (CAIO) has become one of the hottest jobs in the business world. New CAIOs often have the dual mission of leveraging AI to advance business goals while ensuring responsible governance of the technology. As envisioned, CAIO works with other senior leaders to evaluate new AI solutions, support product roadmaps, develop innovative AI products, implement responsible AI practices, and ensure that all AI-impacted players in the business All aspects run smoothly. However, for many organizations, CAIO is often not the right approach to AI infusion and effective implementation.

We've had model-based machine learning systems for decades, and they've been used effectively in many fields, including medical diagnostics, fraud detection, and financial modeling. However, on November 30, 2022, when ChatGPT became the first widely used public large language model (LLM), the world of artificial intelligence as the public knew it changed forever. The world has changed.

In the past, machine learning and artificial intelligence were viewed as tools very similar to compilers or text editors, with specialized technologies and people with special skills to perform them well — but generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is different . LLM and the GenAI it supports provide unprecedented capabilities. This technology is transformative in how it helps humans get better at things we already do well; after all, it is trained on a corpus of human knowledge of things we already do well, and it is very good at pattern matching and extrapolation . The good news is that there's a lot more work to do on the things we already do well: responding to customer support cases, synthesizing existing information into almost any form you want, summarizing phone calls and text messages, and more.

For the first time in human history, we have a trusted partner with whom we can talk, who can reason with us. Instead, we found that, like your loud and opinionated friend, AI is just as persuasive at feeding you false facts as it is the truth. While bias, model drift, and training quality have always been issues, the same is true for LLM. Humans like to be told something, and when they tell it convincingly, they believe it.

With such widespread impact and hype, it's natural for executives and boards to wonder whether they need someone at the top whose sole job is to chart a path amid uncertainty.

Many organizations would like to have one person direct their strategy, but there are more effective ways to achieve their goals. What they should do: Make sure that department-appropriate AI expertise is infused into nearly every part of the company.

Artificial intelligence has a great impact on the company and will even affect the entire company's operations. The company may need a skilled practitioner to provide regular AI advice to senior management. But if you bring in an executive, responsibility and accountability get confused.

In a CIO's organization, AI needs to be well implemented across all company systems, with strong governance to ensure that models are used correctly and ethically. We need to ensure that AI tools are effectively helping customers seeking support, HR software uses AI responsibly, sales and trading desks have the right tools to summarize calls, analyze contracts, etc., and talent acquisition teams are proactive in avoiding bias and promoting candidates diversity while benefiting from artificial intelligence.

If a company produces technology products with a chief technology officer, it makes sense to have an AI platform team to ensure that the use of AI is cost-effective and consistent. Of course, CMOs need to use AI products to analyze SEO, create documentation and analyze competitive data. For software companies, GenAI is a huge boost for both junior and senior developers due to its code generation capabilities. For the very few companies that produce artificial intelligence technology products, they need a complete engineering and product team of artificial intelligence experts.

Having one person oversee all these functions is nearly impossible and (ironically) can hinder AI operations and strategy while slowing down business operations. Instead, it is far more effective to empower C-suite leaders to embrace and leverage AI at their own discretion and pace, based on the individual needs of their departments.

Of course, if you already have a CAIO or still think you'd like one, that's okay. In this case, the CAIO should play an advisory and supervisory role, unlike any other executive. Your other executives are operators, not consultants. This person can advise the board and executive leadership on how the company can effectively adopt AI and identify and deploy best practices across the company.

Whether you have a CAIO or not, an effective step to successfully integrating and adopting AI is to establish an AI committee. The committee will oversee the adoption of AI and should include representatives from every sector. Depending on the business and how it operates, the committee will have representatives from organizations such as the chief information officer, chief technology officer, chief operating officer, and more. Each organization will report on their planned use of AI, the promised business benefits, and how they will set up cost and governance barriers.

The CAIO (purely advisory, non-operational) may chair the committee. The main benefit of an AI committee is to ensure that all voices are heard and that any AI decisions are a collective effort rather than being made in isolation. It also relieves the burden on one person who is tasked with understanding all departments within the organization and distributes this responsibility equally.

An unavoidable fact is that whether it is machine learning or GenAI, artificial intelligence is changing every company. Artificial intelligence is impacting your business, whether through external forces reflecting new customer needs and desires, flanking competitors, or internal forces such as improving efficiency, creating better products, or improving predictability. You can choose to ride the wave or go with the flow.

If you decide to move forward, it's important to respect the way your company and its departments currently operate. All executives must have authority and accountability that empowers them to make the changes and innovations needed and tailor the approach and pace of AI adoption to their specific departments. At the same time, just like the rest of the company, you need coordination and governance, and you already have those processes in place. Rather than creating new processes, AI adoption can be integrated into these processes.

While AI is so new, you may need an AI committee or even a senior advisor to help with the transformation. Over time, artificial intelligence will be integrated into everything you do.