Here’s how artificial intelligence is changing boardrooms
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Since the debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, and the subsequent AI revolution, workers across industries have been hit by sweeping layoffs.
A new report published by IBM last week, however, shows that AI is also reshaping boardrooms and how CEOs make decisions.
The report says 76% of the more than 2,000 organizations surveyed have established a new executive office — that of the chief AI officer (CAIO) — up from 26% in 2025.
Analysts and experts have expressed concerns over the possibility of a labor crisis arising from the proliferation of AI across the corporate sphere.
“AI is driving what may be the largest organizational shift since the industrial and digital revolutions,” Vivek Lath, partner at McKinsey & Company, told CNBC.
The IBM report also found that AI was deepening the influence of one of the C-suite’s most established portfolios, with 59% of respondents expecting the influence of the chief human resources officer (CHRO) to grow.
Blurred lines
As AI has matured, the question of its ownership in the boardroom has led to an increasingly confusing picture.
The existing roster of tech-facing roles, like the chief technology officer, chief information officer and chief data officer, has often introduced ambiguity over AI responsibility at the executive level, according to Lian Jye Su, chief analyst from market research firm Omdia.
So with the emergence of challenges specific to AI adoption — questions of infrastructure, governance, integration, and workflow modernization — firms have increasingly begun establishing a dedicated office in the CAIO to oversee AI transformations, Su said.
This year alone, organizations like HSBC and Lloyds Banking Group have made the move to staff the role.
But estimates of how many companies are appointing CAIOs vary widely.
“Have we seen chief AI officers? Yes. Do I expect that to go mainstream? No, probably not,” Jonathan Tabah, an advisory director at consultancy firm Gartner, said.
Organizations that have appointed CAIOs have “chosen to be at the forefront of this innovation,” Tabah said, adding that creating new C-suite roles often carries significant costs, ones that not every company can justify or afford.
In their report, IBM wrote 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.”
McKinsey sees the responsibility of ensuring centralized coordination of AI efforts across a company as being more important than the creation of a specific title, Lath said.
But the mandate of offices like that of the CAIO often varies across organizations, and typically evolves with time, according to Randy Bean, industry advisor and author of the 2026 AI & Data Leadership Executive Benchmark Survey.
The real question, according to Bean, is whether the nascent CAIO role will be “transitional,” which might then be folded into other executive portfolios once AI transformations mature, or a more permanent one.
The human resource question
“The chief HR officer is uniquely positioned to influence talent management, acquisition, and training processes within the organization,” Omdia’s Su said, adding that employee AI literacy is often a “key hurdle” for most firms.
Similarly, in Bean’s 2026 AI & Data Leadership survey, 93.2% of his respondents cited “cultural challenges,” rather than technological limitations, as the principal hurdle to AI adoption.
Analysts, like Gartner’s Tabah, see AI’s automation potential as a chance to push HR departments toward more strategic roles. “This is [an] opportunity to finally unburden [HR departments] with operational work and to step up and be strategic leaders,” he said.
But Tabah also warned that the opposite is possible. “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.”
More salient, however, may be how executives address the human impacts of AI-led job disruptions.
“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. “That doesn’t mean they’re absolved from responsibility for knowing how to implement or to drive its implementation, but in terms of the impact on their immediate jobs, they will be most insulated.”
C-suite roles, however, frequently resist straightforward codification: tasks like strategic judgments and stakeholder management are harder to outsource to AI algorithms.
“The other part of the answer is [C-suite executives] have the most control over where AI impact is felt, so therefore they have the most ability to protect themselves from disruption,” Tabah added.
Year-to-date, more than 101,000 tech employees have been laid off around the world, according to estimates by Layoffs.fyi. With more than 20,000 job cuts reported across firms like Meta and Microsoft in April, analysts have begun seeing these layoffs as a sign of things to come.
On Thursday, Bain & Company published a report estimating that software-as-a-service firms — some of the hardest hit by new AI capabilities — stood to reap margins of nearly $100 billion by “converting labor costs into software spending by automating coordination work.”
“We’re not suggesting that there isn’t a labor impact. I think we’re just saying that the world doesn’t need another voice… talking about that without putting a context of the positive that’s being done, which is that there’s more work being done, freeing people up to do other things,” David Crawford, management consultant from Bain, told CNBC.
