IBM Report: 76% of Companies Now Have a Chief AI Officer as Boardroom Roles Shift

A new report from IBM has found that 76% of the more than 2,000 organizations surveyed have established a chief AI officer position, up sharply from 26% in 2025, underscoring how rapidly artificial intelligence is reshaping corporate leadership structures.

The findings, published last week, come as companies across industries grapple with how to assign executive ownership over AI adoption, governance, and workforce transformation.

The proliferation of existing tech-facing roles — chief technology officer, chief information officer, chief data officer — has created persistent ambiguity over who holds ultimate responsibility for AI at the executive level, according to Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at market research firm Omdia. The chief AI officer, or CAIO, has emerged as a dedicated answer to that ambiguity.

"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," Hans Dekkers, IBM's Asia Pacific general manager, said.

IBM's report states that CAIOs can "enable calculated risk-taking across the organization," while setting clear AI transformation targets and guidelines that "let teams accelerate without spinning out of control."

Organizations including HSBC and Lloyds Banking Group have filled the role this year. Still, not all analysts expect the title to become standard.

"Have we seen chief AI officers? Yes. Do I expect that to go mainstream? No, probably not," said Jonathan Tabah, an advisory director at Gartner. He noted that creating new C-suite positions carries significant costs that many organizations cannot justify.

McKinsey & Company takes a similar view, emphasizing centralized coordination over any particular title. "AI is driving what may be the largest organizational shift since the industrial and digital revolutions," Vivek Lath, a partner at McKinsey, told CNBC.

The IBM report also found that 59% of respondents expect the influence of the chief human resources officer to grow as AI matures — reflecting the degree to which workforce management has become a central concern.

Su said the CHRO is "uniquely positioned to influence talent management, acquisition, and training processes," and that employee AI literacy remains a "key hurdle" for most firms.

Separately, Randy Bean's 2026 AI & Data Leadership Executive Benchmark Survey found that 93.2% of respondents cited "cultural challenges" — rather than technological limitations — as the principal barrier to AI adoption.

Tabah sees the automation potential of AI as an opening for HR departments to take on more strategic roles, though he cautioned that the outcome depends heavily on how individual organizations are structured. "If HR in your organization is not strategic, and is predominantly an operational function, it will be pushed into a more operational function — it will become more automated," he said.

The report arrives against a backdrop of accelerating workforce disruption. More than 101,000 tech employees have been laid off globally so far this year, according to estimates by Layoffs.fyi. In April alone, firms including Meta and Microsoft reported more than 20,000 combined job cuts.

A separate report published Thursday by Bain & Company estimated that software-as-a-service companies stood to reap margins of nearly $100 billion by "converting labor costs into software spending by automating coordination work."

Senior executives, for now, appear largely insulated from that disruption. "In the short-term, I expect the high-level executive roles to face the least disruption ... they're the most insulated from AI," Tabah said, noting that tasks like strategic judgment and stakeholder management resist automation. He added, however, that C-suite leaders retain the most control over where AI's impact is felt — and therefore bear direct responsibility for how it is deployed.

Whether the CAIO role proves permanent or transitional remains an open question. Bean described the central issue as whether the position will eventually be absorbed into existing executive portfolios once AI transformations mature, or become a lasting fixture of corporate governance.

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