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Since the debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022 and the ensuing AI revolution, workers across all industries have experienced across-the-board layoffs.
New report published by IBM But last week showed that AI is also reshaping how boards of directors and CEOs make decisions.
According to the report, 76% of the more than 2,000 organizations surveyed have created a new executive department (chief AI officer (CAIO)), up from 26% in 2025.
Analysts and experts have expressed concerns about the potential for a labor crisis as AI spreads across the corporate landscape.
“AI is driving what may be the biggest organizational transformation since the industrial and digital revolutions,” Vivek Rath, a partner at McKinsey & Company, told CNBC.
IBM’s report also found that AI is deepening its influence in one of the C-suite’s most established portfolios, with 59% of respondents expecting the influence of chief human resources officers (CHROs) to expand.
blurred lines
As AI matures, the picture becomes increasingly confusing due to issues of AI ownership in the boardroom.
Lian Jie Hsu, chief analyst at market research firm Omdia, said the existing roster of technology roles such as chief technology officer, chief information officer and chief data officer often creates ambiguity about AI responsibilities at the C-level.
As a result, companies are starting to establish dedicated offices at CAIO to oversee their AI transformations as AI adoption presents unique challenges, including infrastructure, governance, integration, and workflow modernization, Su said.
This year alone, organizations such as HSBC and Lloyds Banking Group have moved to hire people for this role.
However, estimates of the number of companies appointing CAIOs vary widely.
“Have you seen a chief AI officer? Yes. Do you think that will become mainstream? No, probably not,” says Jonathan Taber, advisory director at a consulting firm. gartnersaid.
Organizations that appoint CAIOs “have chosen to be at the forefront of this innovation,” Tabor said, adding that creating new executive roles often comes at a significant cost that not all companies can justify or afford.
IBM wrote in the report that CAIO “enables calculated risk-taking across the organization” while setting clear AI transformation goals and guidelines that “teams can accelerate without spinning out of control.”
McKinsey believes its responsibility to centrally coordinate AI efforts across the enterprise is more important than creating a specific title, Russ said.
But according to Randy Bean, industry advisor and author of the 2026 AI & Data Leadership Executive Benchmark Study, the mission of an office like a CAIO often varies by organization and typically evolves over time.
The real question, Bean said, is whether the nascent CAIO role is “transitional” and could be incorporated into other executive portfolios once the AI transformation matures, or whether it will become more permanent.
Human resources questions
“Chief human resources officers are in a unique position to influence talent management, talent acquisition, and training processes within an organization,” said Omdia’s Su, adding that employee AI literacy is a “key hurdle” for many companies.
Similarly, in Bean’s 2026 AI and Data Leadership Survey, 93.2% of respondents cited “cultural challenges” rather than technical limitations as the primary barrier to AI adoption.
Analysts like Gartner’s Tabah see the automation potential of AI as an opportunity to encourage HR to take on a more strategic role. “This is an opportunity to finally take some of the workload off[human resources]and step up and become a strategic leader,” he said.
But Taba also warned that the opposite could be true. “If HR within an organization is primarily operational rather than strategic, HR will be pushed more into operations and become more automated.”
But perhaps more telling is how executives are dealing with the human impact of AI-induced employment disruption.
“In the short term, we expect senior leadership roles to be the least disruptive…they are the most insulated from AI,” Tabor said. “That doesn’t mean they’ll be absolved of the responsibility of knowing how to implement it or how to drive implementation, but they’ll be most absolved in terms of the impact on the job at hand.”
But the role of the executive often resists simple codification, making it difficult to outsource tasks such as strategic decisions and stakeholder management to AI algorithms.
“Another part of the answer is that[executives]have the most control over where the impact of AI is felt, so they are best able to protect themselves from disruption,” Tabor added.
Layoffs.fyi estimates that more than 101,000 technology employees have been laid off worldwide since the beginning of the year. More than 20,000 job cuts have been reported across companies such as Meta and microsoft In April, analysts began seeing these layoffs as a sign of things to come.
On Thursday, Bain & Company released a report estimating that some of the software-as-a-service companies hardest hit by new AI capabilities could reap nearly $100 billion by “transforming labor costs into software spend by automating reconciliation tasks.”
“We’re not saying there’s no impact on labor. I think we’re just saying the world doesn’t need another voice… We’re talking about it without putting it in the context of the positive things that are going on right now, which is more work being done and people being freed up to do other things,” Bain management consultant David Crawford told CNBC.
