The goal of a Chief AI Officer should be to eliminate the need for a Chief AI Officer.

A friend was sharing with me that he’s been asked to find a ‘Chief AI Officer’. Why? The board wants a name on a slide. The CEO wants a throat to choke. The CFO wants a budget line that could be defended at the next review. Ultimately, everyone wants the same thing: one person who owns it.

The role is transitional. It exists because the operating model hasn’t caught up with where AI accountability actually sits. Procurement decides which models get bought. Governance decides what risk is tolerable. The function heads decide what gets deployed into their workflows. Data owners decide what the models are allowed to see. Finance decides what counts as a return. None of that can be lifted out and parked in a single seat without breaking the accountability lines that already exist.

What a Chief AI Officer does well, for a window, is force the conversation and set the standards, pushing the governance scaffolding into place. That’s real work. But it’s scaffolding work, not a permanent function.

Once the operating model has absorbed AI into how decisions actually get made, the seat dissolves into the seats that were always going to own it.

If the role is still there in two years, the transformation didn’t happen. Someone just got a title.