Do you need a chief AI officer?

IBM and Oxford Economics asked 2,000 chief executives this year whether their organisation has a chief AI officer. 76% said yes, up from 26% a year earlier. That is CEOs describing their own org charts, so treat the pace as directional, but the direction is hard to argue with. Wharton’s survey of firms with a thousand or more staff found the title in 61% of them last autumn, Deloitte named its first UK chief AI officer in June and the UK government has now hired one of its own.

That is the backdrop to a question that has started reaching us at OpenKit: does a firm our size need one? We run AI audits for UK businesses, which is in practice the work this role exists to own, so we have watched the decision from the inside. There are three honest answers. Hire the executive, rent the executive by the day, or buy the decisions without the job title.

What the job is when it works.

A chief AI officer is the executive who owns where AI fits the business and the rules it runs under. Strip the title back and there are two jobs inside it. The first is direction. Someone has to decide where AI fits the business, which workflows it should touch first and what the evidence must show before anything scales. The second is governance, meaning the rules have an owner: which data can reach which tools, who signs off an output, what happens when a model gets something wrong. Gartner describes the role as orchestration plus governance and advises most organisations against rushing the C-suite version, because a head of AI below board level covers both jobs for most firms.

Neither job is hands-on engineering. Wharton found the title usually went to an executive the company already employed rather than to a new hire, which fits what we see in audits: firms mostly need somebody to own the decisions they are already half-making.

UK adoption is wide but shallow.

The ONS has measured AI use in UK businesses since 2023. Among firms with ten or more employees it rose from roughly 12% in late 2023 to 35% this year, yet the average adopting business still uses fewer than two AI technologies. Most firms have started but very few have gone deep. The ground between those two states is exactly what a chief AI officer is meant to hold.

No UK law requires the role. The United States ordered every federal agency to designate a chief AI officer in 2024, but no equivalent duty exists on a UK business, so appointing one here is a strategy choice rather than compliance. The pay data shows how seriously firms are treating that choice. ITJobsWatch puts the UK median for a head of AI at £100,000 across 114 advertised roles in the six months to August, down from £110,000 a year earlier, while the government advertised its own chief AI officer post at up to £175,000.

What a fractional chief AI officer gets you.

A fractional chief AI officer is the same remit bought by the day: a senior person who sets AI direction for two or three businesses at once. You will also see it sold as a virtual chief AI officer or vCAIO, a label borrowed from the virtual CIO that IT service providers have offered for years, or plainly as a part-time chief AI officer. UK firms selling the service advertise between £2,000 and £15,000 a month depending on days per week, which against a six-figure salary plus employer costs is the entire appeal. For a business that needs the decisions made but cannot justify the seat, renting the seat sounds like the obvious answer.

The limits deserve equal airtime. CIO.com’s review of how the role has evolved found that chief AI officers appointed without a mandate or budget become symbolic and tend to disappear within 18 to 24 months, a risk that grows when the person is in the building one day a week. SHRM flags a second problem: an executive whose role exists to champion AI has an incentive to recommend the expensive transformation over the boring fix. Harvard Business Review goes further and argues the remit is wider than any single leader can carry. The common thread is authority. A chief AI officer, full time or fractional, only earns the title when it arrives with a budget and a route to delivery.

You can buy the decisions without the hire.

For most mid-sized firms the missing thing is the first six months of the role’s output: a map of where AI fits your workflows and a costed order of work to follow it, with the rules written down along the way. That is what an AI audit is for. Ours runs three to four weeks and ends with a prioritised 12 month roadmap.

When the roadmap needs an owner, the engagement continues on retainer. OpenKit becomes your business’s embedded AI team: the people who ran your audit stay on to deliver it. That arrangement is the Embedded AI Lead, reviewed month by month. It covers the ground a fractional chief AI officer would hold and adds the people who build what gets decided.

How to choose.

A full-time chief AI officer is the right call when AI sits at the centre of your strategy and the board will fund the role properly. Deloitte and the UK government fit that description. Most firms between fifty and five hundred people do not. A fractional appointment fits when the delivery capacity already exists in-house and what is missing is senior judgement a few days a month. When both the decisions and the delivery are missing, buy them together.