The hottest job in corporate America belongs to company leaders heading AI
SAN FRANCISCO >> In September, the Mayo Clinic in Arizona created a first-ofits-kind job at the hospital system: chief artificial intelligence officer.
Doctors at the Arizona site, which has facilities in Phoenix and Scottsdale, had experimented with AI for years. But after ChatGPT's release in 2022 and an ensuing frenzy over the technology, the hospital decided it needed to work more with AI and find someone to coordinate the efforts.
So executives appointed Dr. Bhavik Patel, a radiologist who specializes in AI, to the new job. Patel has since piloted a new AI model that could help speed up the diagnosis of a rare heart disease by looking for hidden data in ultrasounds.
“We're really trying to foster some of these data and AI capabilities throughout every department, every division, every work group,” said Dr. Richard Gray, the CEO of the Mayo Clinic in Arizona. The chief AI officer role was hatched because “it helps to have a coordinating function with the depth of expertise.”
Many people have long feared that AI would kill jobs. But a boom in the technology has instead spurred law firms, hospitals, insurance companies, government agencies and universities to create what has become the hottest new role in corporate America and beyond: the senior executive in charge of AI.
The Equifax credit bureau, the manufacturer Ashley Furniture and law firms such as Eversheds Sutherland have appointed AI executives over the past year. In December, The New York Times named an editorial director of AI initiatives. And more than 400 federal departments and agencies looked for chief AI officers last year to comply with an executive order by President Joe Biden that created safeguards for the technology.
In total, 122 people with the title of chief or vice president of AI joined a forum last year on Glassdoor, up from 19 in 2022, Glassdoor said.
The AI executive jobs are appearing because organizations want to harness the transformative technology, said Randy Bean, the founder of the consulting firm NewVantage Partners, who advises companies on data and AI leadership. At the same time, he said, “organizations want to say, `Yeah, we have a chief AI officer,' because that makes them look good.”
Other executive jobs have been formed in response to major technological and financial changes. In the 1980s, advances in computing power led to a boom in chief information officers and chief technology officers, who typically oversee how technology is used within a company or develop it. After the 2008 financial crisis, chief data officers were appointed to comply with new regulations and to manage how companies used data.
With AI executive roles, companies and organizations are looking for someone to help them navigate the technology's risks and potential and how it might change the way people work.
In May, health insurer Florida Blue promoted Svetlana Bender to vice president of AI and behavioral science for just that purpose. One of her first AI projects was to pilot an internal chatbot that can help write computer code and analyze customer data.
Bender, who was previously Florida Blue's director of technology solutions, said her team would train the chatbot on customer data and open it to all employees to use. This month, she hired a director of AI to help with the work
“We want to move as quickly as possible” on using the technology, while making sure to keep customers' insurance data safe, she said.
Accenture added a chief AI officer in September as clients became interested in the technology. The company promoted Lan Guan, who worked on global data and AI, to the role to advise customers on how to incorporate AI into their businesses. Accenture is also building AI tools, including for the insurance industry.
The new job “underscores our ambition in the market, and how optimistic we are about what we're seeing as the huge potential for our clients inAI,” Guan said.
Some experts said the technology was changing so rapidly, it could soon outpace the roles. A Harvard Business Review article last year posited that chief AI and data officers were set up to fail because the jobs were “a high-pressure balancing act with a technology that offers huge risks and opportunities.”
Karin Kimbrough, the chief economist at LinkedIn, said AI also would evolve from a newfangled technology to something baked into everyone's job. “AI will be across many roles, and it will be so ingrained that the specific AI job title will start to go away,” she said.
Some chief AI officers said their job had staying power. Patel said a large part of his new job was to communicate with other doctors and regulators like the Food and Drug Administration and to identify how AI can make medical work more efficient.
“Modern-day health care still has a lot of gaps,” he said. “This is where I think we can smartly use artificial intelligence to bridge that gap, or at least reduce that.”