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For the reason that debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, and the next AI revolution, staff throughout industries have been hit by sweeping layoffs.
A brand new report revealed by IBM final week, nonetheless, exhibits that AI can be reshaping boardrooms and the way CEOs make selections.
The report says 76% of the greater than 2,000 organizations surveyed have established a brand new govt workplace — that of the chief AI officer (CAIO) — up from 26% in 2025.
Analysts and specialists have expressed considerations over the potential for a labor disaster arising from the proliferation of AI throughout the company sphere.
“AI is driving what will be the largest organizational shift for the reason that industrial and digital revolutions,” Vivek Lath, associate at McKinsey & Firm, advised CNBC.
The IBM report additionally discovered that AI was deepening the affect of one of many C-suite’s most established portfolios, with 59% of respondents anticipating the affect of the chief human assets officer (CHRO) to develop.
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As AI has matured, the query of its possession within the boardroom has led to an more and more complicated image.
The present roster of tech-facing roles, just like the chief expertise officer, chief data officer and chief knowledge officer, has typically launched ambiguity over AI accountability on the govt degree, in response to Lian Jye Su, chief analyst from market analysis agency Omdia.
So with the emergence of challenges particular to AI adoption — questions of infrastructure, governance, integration, and workflow modernization — corporations have more and more begun establishing a devoted workplace within the CAIO to supervise AI transformations, Su mentioned.
This 12 months alone, organizations like HSBC and Lloyds Banking Group have made the transfer to workers the function.
However estimates of what number of firms are appointing CAIOs fluctuate extensively.
“Have we seen chief AI officers? Sure. Do I count on that to go mainstream? No, most likely not,” Jonathan Tabah, an advisory director at consultancy agency Gartner, mentioned.
Organizations which have appointed CAIOs have “chosen to be on the forefront of this innovation,” Tabah mentioned, including that creating new C-suite roles typically carries important prices, ones that not each firm can justify or afford.
However the emergence of the CAIO function, in response to Hans Dekkers, IBM’s Asia Pacific common supervisor, displays a way that “AI is not only a expertise initiative.”
“Whereas the CIO, CTO, and Chief Information Officer every play vital roles in expertise, innovation, infrastructure, and knowledge administration, the CAIO’s remit is concentrated on how AI is utilized throughout the enterprise to alter how work, selections, and execution occur,” he mentioned.
IBM wrote of their report that CAIOs can “allow calculated risk-taking throughout the group,” whereas setting clear AI transformation targets and pointers that “let groups speed up with out spinning uncontrolled.”
McKinsey sees the accountability of guaranteeing centralized coordination of AI efforts throughout an organization as being extra vital than the creation of a selected title, Lath mentioned.
However the mandate of places of work like that of the CAIO typically varies throughout organizations, and sometimes evolves with time, in response to Randy Bean, trade advisor and writer of the 2026 AI & Information Management Govt Benchmark Survey.
The actual query, in response to Bean, is whether or not the nascent CAIO function can be “transitional,” which could then be folded into different govt portfolios as soon as AI transformations mature, or a extra everlasting one.
The human useful resource query
“The chief HR officer is uniquely positioned to affect expertise administration, acquisition, and coaching processes throughout the group,” Omdia’s Su mentioned, including that worker AI literacy is usually a “key hurdle” for many corporations.
Equally, in Bean’s 2026 AI & Information Management survey, 93.2% of his respondents cited “cultural challenges,” somewhat than technological limitations, because the principal hurdle to AI adoption.
Analysts, like Gartner’s Tabah, see AI’s automation potential as an opportunity to push HR departments towards extra strategic roles. “That is [an] alternative to lastly unburden [HR departments] with operational work and to step up and be strategic leaders,” he mentioned.
However Tabah additionally warned that the alternative is feasible. “If HR in your group just isn’t strategic, and is predominantly an operational perform, it will likely be pushed right into a extra operational perform — it’ll change into extra automated.”
Extra salient, nonetheless, could also be how executives handle the human impacts of AI-led job disruptions.
“Within the short-term, I count on the high-level govt roles to face the least disruption … they’re essentially the most insulated from AI,” Tabah mentioned. “That does not imply they’re absolved from accountability for understanding the best way to implement or to drive its implementation, however when it comes to the impression on their rapid jobs, they are going to be most insulated.”
C-suite roles, nonetheless, incessantly resist easy codification: duties like strategic judgments and stakeholder administration are more durable to outsource to AI algorithms.
“The opposite a part of the reply is [C-suite executives] have essentially the most management over the place AI impression is felt, so due to this fact they’ve essentially the most skill to guard themselves from disruption,” Tabah added.
Yr-to-date, greater than 101,000 tech staff have been laid off world wide, in response to estimates by Layoffs.fyi. With greater than 20,000 job cuts reported throughout corporations like Meta and Microsoft in April, analysts have begun seeing these layoffs as an indication of issues to come back.
On Thursday, Bain & Firm revealed a report estimating that software-as-a-service corporations — a number of the hardest hit by new AI capabilities — stood to reap margins of practically $100 billion by “changing labor prices into software program spending by automating coordination work.”
“We’re not suggesting that there is not a labor impression. I believe we’re simply saying that the world would not want one other voice… speaking about that with out placing a context of the constructive that is being finished, which is that there is extra work being finished, releasing individuals as much as do different issues,” David Crawford, administration marketing consultant from Bain, advised CNBC.
