A post came across my feed this week that I have not been able to put down. A client wanted a Chief AI Officer and told its search partner not to look for a technologist, because the technologists were already in the building. What was missing was the capacity to prioritise between competing uses, to stop things, to hold anyone to a horizon beyond the next quarter. The search partner pressure-tested that brief rather than simply filling it, which is rarer in his profession than it ought to be, and the result is the most thoughtful version of this specification I have seen. It is also, I think, a specification for a job that already exists and is already occupied. What follows is a critique of the environment that produces such vacancies, not of the people navigating it — and it ends somewhere less comfortable than it begins, with the question of what a new office actually protects.

In This Article

• Read the requirements as a list and they describe the strategy function; the client has specified a Chief Strategy Officer and attached a technology to the title.
• An organisation that appoints someone to run its artificial intelligence has already conceded that the work sits alongside how it creates value rather than inside it — the very separation the appointment was meant to prevent.
• The Chief Digital, Transformation and Innovation Officers were scaffolding, and scaffolding properly understood carries a removal date that these offices are never given.
• Executive saturation is a real constraint and also the most respectable available account of an incapacity nobody wishes to name.
• The new office comes with an insurance policy: if the appointee succeeds nothing had to change, and if the appointee fails the search firm or the individual carries the blame — either way the incumbents are the one party the outcome never implicates.

A Thought With Which To Sit

The instinct to create a post rather than confront an incumbent is not an operational decision. It is a governance evasion, and it is available precisely because creating a role requires no one to be told anything unwelcome.