What does a Chief AI Officer do, and does your business need one?

By Saeed Anwar, CEO · 25 October 2026 · 6 min read

What a Chief AI Officer is responsible for, the signs your business needs one, and how a fractional Chief AI Officer gives you the same leadership without a full-time hire.

The short answer

A Chief AI Officer is the person who decides where artificial intelligence should be used in a business, makes sure it gets built properly, and makes sure people actually use it. The role sits between leadership, the people doing the work and the technology.

Large companies hire one full time. Most small and mid-sized businesses don't need a full-time executive, but they do need someone to do the job.

What the role covers

Whatever the job title, the work tends to fall into five areas:

  • Strategy: choosing which problems AI should solve first, based on what each one is likely to return.
  • Tools and vendors: deciding what to buy, what to build and which providers to trust with company data.
  • Delivery: overseeing the projects that put AI into daily work, from chat and voice agents to internal automation.
  • People: training teams so new tools are used rather than abandoned after a week.
  • Risk: setting clear rules for how AI may be used with customer and company data.

Signs your business needs one

You probably need someone in this role if several of these sound familiar:

  • People across the company are trying different AI tools with no shared plan.
  • You've paid for AI software that nobody uses after the first month.
  • Your team spends hours on repetitive work: answering the same questions, copying data between systems, chasing follow-ups.
  • Competitors talk about AI and you're not sure what is real and what is noise.
  • Nobody can say which company data is safe to put into an AI tool.

Full-time hire or fractional?

A full-time Chief AI Officer makes sense when AI is central to the product and there's a large team to lead. For most businesses the work comes in phases: a strategy and roadmap first, then a few focused projects, then training and support.

A fractional Chief AI Officer covers those phases part-time. You get the same senior judgement for the length of the work, and the cost scales with what you actually need.

How to start

Start with an audit rather than a tool. Write down the tasks your team repeats every week and how long they take, then rank them by how much time or money fixing them would save. The top two or three are your first AI projects.

If you'd like help running that audit and turning it into a roadmap, that is exactly what we do at Maktek.