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This spring, the U.S. government took an unprecedented step: requiring every U.S. agency to appoint an AI chief. This follows on the heels of companies across industries adding similar roles to their leadership ranks.
This is a step in the right direction for companies looking to integrate AI, but it isn’t enough on its own. Yes, every company needs to become an AI company. But expecting an AI manager to do the job alone is short-sighted.
When companies are faced with a major technological change, their instinctive reaction is often to stick with what they know: hire a new executive and hope he can fix everything. But for AI to truly take root in a company, people at all levels of the company need to get their hands on it and start innovating, not following the orders of a janitor in the C-suite.
In fact, the fastest way to integrate AI into a company, in some cases, may be to skip the chief AI officer role altogether.
Related: The future founder’s guide to artificial intelligence
Why having an AI manager might not make sense
Companies that appoint a head of AI have good intentions as they try to avoid being disrupted by the technology. But they may not need this role, and any company adding it should assume it is temporary.
A useful comparison is the rush in the middle of the last decade to appoint chief digital officers to oversee the digital transformation to the Internet and mobile technologies. In hindsight, it seems bizarre.
Experts have called CDO the next big executive title, but it has often proven to be little more than window dressing, especially when digital skills have become table stakes for most employees. In recent years, companies have abandoned this role or transformed it into other jobs. In digital native companies, it doesn’t exist at all.
Google, for example, has never had a CDO dictating how employees use web technology. Instead, they empowered employees to explore tools on their own through initiatives like 20% time, laying the groundwork for innovations like Gmail.
Likewise, AI-native companies do not have an executive overseeing AI. That would be redundant. At companies like mine, technology is integrated from day one throughout the organization rather than relegated to a single role.
By default, we all leverage artificial intelligence. Our marketing team uses it to better understand our customer base, our engineers implement it to help write code, and our customer support relies heavily on AI agents. Artificial intelligence is integrated into every role, just as digital literacy is in almost every business today. Of course, there are areas of our business where we could use AI more and better, but making that happen doesn’t require a specific job title. It is everyone’s responsibility.
A better way to usher in an AI transformation
But I realize that not all companies are built from the ground up on AI. So how can legacy companies make strides in integrating technology?
Instead of the top-down response to organizational change, consider a bottom-up approach. For a company that wants to usher in an AI transformation, the first step is to look at the roles you’re already hiring for and pick a few where AI agents can do the work today.
Customer service is an obvious place to start: today’s AI agents can now deal with most problems at least as well as humans. AI-powered sales development representatives (SDRs) are also having an immediate impact, automating much of the work needed to pursue prospects. Another promising area: junior data analyst roles, which often involve extracting information from reports. Then there’s the coding. The autonomous software engineering agent Devin and OpenDevin, its open source rival, can step in here.
Equally important is choosing the right technology partner to provide artificial intelligence tools. When it comes to customer service, for example, companies should look for a vendor whose AI agents have a proven track record of resolving most issues without human intervention. Rather than following a script, they should have some ability to reason, drawing on past interactions and ongoing conversation to determine the best solution for each customer’s specific problem.
So, it’s important to treat your agents more like employees than software that will work out of the box. Onboarding, measurement, and coaching—the same steps you would take to develop any new hire—are essential to getting the most out of AI tools.
On the bright side, team members experience AI and begin to develop AI expertise within the company. For example, my company works with a financial services company where AI employee manager has become a key position. Former customer service specialists now teach AI agents new skills that add value to the entire company, thus making them an indispensable member of the team.
Companies can even make boosting productivity through AI a criterion for career advancement. To get promoted, an employee must show their manager how they are applying AI to achieve results for the company.
Related: How generative AI is revamping digital transformation to change how businesses scale
The next phase: These departments transform into mini centers of excellence that spread AI knowledge and best practices throughout the organization. Team members train the rest of the company on how to hire and coordinate AI-powered labor. AI is being integrated into daily business operations in a way that is difficult to achieve with a purely top-down approach.
Of course, there is no best way to take a company through an AI-driven transformation. For traditional sectors and large enterprises, a tandem approach, combining top-down and bottom-up, may prove to be the best solution.
At the very least, organizations that want to get the transformation right should think about how they can help AI emerge within the ranks, rather than rushing to hire an AI lead simply because others have taken this step. Since AI permanently changes businesses from top to bottom, it is only a temporary solution.