Virtual Chief AI Officers will be key C-Suite members in successful businesses for 3 reasons.
- AI will be exploited in all business departments from marketing to production, from accounting to legal, from HR to strategy, from capital allocation decisions to mergers and acquisitions.
- Business will need to do things better, faster and cheaper to survive and remain competitive.
- Those that exploit AI most effectively will be the winners.
Utilising AI tools to maximum effect will demand Board level representation to make sure its adoption is sponsored across the organisation.
Will there be a conflict with IT? Yes. But smart CTOs will already have recognised the importance and value of AI as a code-writing accelerator, as a security enhancer and as client support agent that will reduce the demands made on expensive staff whilst freeing them up to focus on higher value activities. Issues may arise as AI becomes integral to executive decision taking leaving the IT department to focus on the vital, but less sexy role, of data processing. The skills needed to exploit AI are evolving and seem different from IT skills but there is considerable overlap whether in building machine learning tools to run on in-house data or using prompts to debug and refine coding. It also pays to remember that AI is not simply about the rapid development of increasingly impressive large language models. There’s a lot more going on than that and progress is accelerating. No one person can keep up to date with developments let alone run a business department effectively.