Before you hire a Chief AI Officer, decide what the job is.
Joshua Hollander ·
A conversation this fall reminded me how fast the Chief AI Officer title is spreading. Someone asked why a company of several thousand people did not have one yet, as though the missing piece were a box on the org chart.
I watched a version of this when the Chief Digital Officer title spread through insurance, where I spend a lot of my time. A carrier would hire someone with a strong technology background from outside the industry. Six months later the pilot had stalled, because the underwriters did not trust the model's output and compliance had raised a question nobody had scoped.
The problem was rarely that the executive did not understand the technology. Understanding the technology was the smaller part of the job.
The job is translation
The people who actually get AI into production can sit with the person who runs a line of business and explain why a model behaves the way it does, and then sit with a regulator, an auditor or a board and defend it. That is a translation job, and the skill is much rarer than the technical one, which is why the title is easier to fill than the role.
Write the job description around three answers
Before you open the search, decide which decisions the role will own and which it will only advise on. A Chief AI Officer with no authority over budget or process tends to become an internal consultant.
Then name the two or three groups that have to trust the output for anything to reach production, such as underwriting, finance, operations or HR. The candidate you want has earned that kind of trust before, from people like these.
Finally, describe what the first twelve months should produce as work that is running in the business, rather than as a list of pilots.
With those three answers written down, weight the search toward the person who has carried an organization through a change like this before, even if the next candidate has the more impressive technical background. The technical skill is easier to find, and in a search it is also easier to verify.