What is a Chief AI Officer (CAIO)?
Over the last few years it seems like the C-suite has been expanding. Corporations are including new positions in the C-suite like ones for diversity officers [1]. We have also seen organizations start to include the Chief AI Officer (CAIO). You can go out and search for these types of job postings and I do think that they are interesting [2]. You could check out a 2016 article in the Harvard Business Review from Andrew Ng about “Hiring your first Chief AI Officer” to get a flavor of what the position is all about [3]. Having a strong technical background, being able to work across towers, solid collaboration skills, and being able to keep talent were noted as the core considerations for a Chief AI Officer. You are probably thinking that those four things probably hold true for any high level information technology position. That is probably true and could be generalized across the technology space.
I think it is probably more important to think about what the organization is signaling by having a Chief AI Officer. Just creating and staffing the position signals to the company and the outside world that artificial intelligence is a part of the overall strategy for the company at the C-suite level. My personal position on having a machine learning strategy and linking it to budget level KPIs is pretty clear. Hiring a Chief AI Officer could take that type of strategic proposition and kickstart it into a top down focus on artificial intelligence for the organization.
You might be surprised to find out that Andrew Ng’s article from 2016 has been cited 12 times so far at the start of 2022 according to the results from Google Scholar [4]. The first few articles that showed up seemed interesting enough. One of them directly challenged the need for having a Chief AI Officer in banking related companies [5]. To my surprise it was actually a master's thesis that got pulled into the Google Scholar search. I really did expect to see more scholar citations around what Andrew Ng wrote.
To directly answer the question for this week a Chief AI Officer is a C-suite level position focused on artificial intelligence for the organization. I could not figure out how prevalent this position is actually becoming in the marketplace. It seems like something that is going to be a big part of the corporate strategy for some organizations and way outside what would be considered for other organizations. Given how diversified machine learning is becoming and how embedded it will be within technology moving forward it would be wise to have a machine learning strategy. That does not necessarily mean you need a Chief AI Office, but an organization has to figure out a strategy related to machine learning even if it was just a defensive one.
Links and thoughts:
“CS330: Deep Multi-task and Meta Learning | 2020 | Lecture 1 - Introduction & Multi-Task Learning”
From Yannic Klcher, “Predicting the rules behind - Deep Symbolic Regression for Recurrent Sequences (w/ author interview)”
Microsoft Developer, “AI Show Live - Episode 49 - Question Answering in General Availability”
“WAN Show January 28, 2022”
Top 5 Tweets of the week:
Footnotes:
[1] Valet, V. (2020, December 28). The New C-Suite: How 2020 Shaped Corporate America’s Executive Ranks. Forbes. Retrieved January 30, 2022, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/vickyvalet/2021/12/28/the-new-c-suite-how-2020-shaped-corporate-americas-executive-ranks/?sh=2bf3a7df7b24
[2] LinkedIn. (n.d.). Chief AI Officer. Jobs. Retrieved January 30, 2022, from https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/search/?geoId=103644278&keywords=%22chief%20ai%20officer%22&location=United%20State
[3] Valet, V. (2020, December 28). The New C-Suite: How 2020 Shaped Corporate America’s Executive Ranks. Forbes. Retrieved January 30, 2022, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/vickyvalet/2021/12/28/the-new-c-suite-how-2020-shaped-corporate-americas-executive-ranks/?sh=2bf3a7df7b24
[4] Google Scholar. (n.d.). Hiring your first chief AI officer. Search. Retrieved January 30, 2022, from https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=2830727318348286643&as_sdt=4005&sciodt=0,6&hl=en
[5] Google Scholar. (n.d.). Hiring your first chief AI officer. Search. Retrieved January 30, 2022, from https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=2830727318348286643&as_sdt=4005&sciodt=0,6&hl=en
What’s next for The Lindahl Letter?
Week 55: Who is acquiring machine learning patents?
Week 56: Comparative analysis of national AI strategies
Week 57: How would I compose an ML syllabus?
Week 58: Teaching or training machine learning skills
Week 59: Multimodal machine learning revisited
I’ll try to keep the what’s next list forward looking with at least five weeks of posts in planning or review. If you enjoyed reading this content, then please take a moment and share it with a friend.