Who is Sitting in My Seat, Said the CDO/CAIO?

It’s time we stop wasting our most strategically valuable leaders on tactical work.

The CDO and CAIO roles were never meant to be permanent platform buyers, program managers, or glorified data plumbers. Yet too many organizations have anchored them there heads down in tooling decisions while the business asks why AI pilots never translate into value.

That model is now obsolete.

The CDO/CAIO must be lifted out of the tactical and repositioned where they belong: shaping how the company will evolve, how new business models will emerge, and how data and AI enable the outcomes the strategy actually demands. Their job is not to build the engine; it is to support where the organization is going and how data and AI accelerate the journey.

Platform decisions, architecture, and engineering execution should sit squarely with the CIO and CTO. That separation is healthy. It creates clarity of accountability, and, more importantly, it gives the CDO/CAIO the space to focus on the hardest problem in AI today: moving the organization from experimentation to sustained value.

But role clarity alone isn’t enough. The operating model must change.

AI cannot be “onboarded” through a center of excellence and a handful of specialists. It must be embedded into how decisions are made, how products are designed, how risk is managed, and how people work every day. That requires a shift in behavior and mindset across the organization. Leaders must own AI outcomes in their domains.

Teams must be accountable for adoption, not just delivery. Incentives, governance, and ways of working must reinforce that AI is part of the business, not a side project.

The payoff is significant.

Organizations that get this right move faster from pilot to value. They align AI investment directly to strategic outcomes. They reduce wasteful experimentation. They build capabilities that compound over time rather than reset with every new initiative. Most importantly, they make data and AI a pervasive organizational capability and not the responsibility of one heroic role.

AI is no longer the job of “the data team.” It’s everyone’s job, and the CDO/CAIO should be the strategic enabler who makes that possible, not the person stuck choosing the next platform.

2 questions:

• Is your CDO/CAIO shaping the future business model or still being measured on platforms and pilots?
• If AI is now everyone’s job, what have you actually changed in your operating model to make that true?