A new executive title is spreading rapidly through corporate boardrooms. According to a report by IBM published last week, 76% of more than 2,000 organizations surveyed have established the role of chief AI officer, known as a CAIO, up from just 26% in 2025. The dramatic one-year jump reflects how quickly companies are moving to formalize oversight of artificial intelligence at the highest levels of leadership.
The report comes as AI has moved from a back-office technology experiment to a central factor in how major organizations make decisions, allocate resources, and structure their workforces. Since the debut of OpenAI's ChatGPT in 2022, workers across industries have faced sweeping layoffs tied to automation, and analysts and experts have expressed concerns over the possibility of a broader labor crisis as AI expands through the corporate sphere.
Vivek Lath, a partner at McKinsey and Company, framed the scale of the change in stark terms. "AI is driving what may be the largest organizational shift since the industrial and digital revolutions," Lath told CNBC.
The creation of a CAIO role has not been without confusion. Corporate boardrooms already house a roster of tech-facing executives, including chief technology officers, chief information officers, and chief data officers, and the overlap has created ambiguity about who is actually responsible for AI at the top of an organization. Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at market research firm Omdia, said that as challenges specific to AI adoption have grown, including questions around infrastructure, governance, integration, and workflow modernization, firms have increasingly moved to create a dedicated office to oversee AI transformations.
HSBC and Lloyds Banking Group are among the organizations that have appointed CAIOs in 2026. But opinion is divided on whether the role will become standard practice across industries. Jonathan Tabah, an advisory director at consultancy firm Gartner, offered a measured view. "Have we seen chief AI officers? Yes. Do I expect that to go mainstream? No, probably not," he said. Organizations that have appointed CAIOs have "chosen to be at the forefront of this innovation," Tabah added, noting that creating new C-suite roles carries significant costs that not every company can justify or afford.
Hans Dekkers, IBM's Asia Pacific general manager, argued that the CAIO position fills a gap that other executive roles cannot. "While the CIO, CTO, and Chief Data Officer each play critical roles in technology, innovation, infrastructure, and data management, the CAIO's remit is focused on how AI is applied across the enterprise to change how work, decisions, and execution happen," he said.
IBM's report described CAIOs as able to "enable calculated risk-taking across the organization," while setting clear AI transformation targets and guidelines that "let teams accelerate without spinning out of control." McKinsey, for its part, has placed more emphasis on the function itself than on any specific title, viewing centralized coordination of AI efforts across a company as the more critical priority.
The IBM report also found that the surge in AI adoption is reshaping more than just the new CAIO role. Some 59% of respondents said they expect the influence of the chief human resources officer to grow as AI deepens its reach across organizations, a signal that managing the human side of the AI transition is becoming a top-level concern alongside the technology itself.
