Why brands and agencies are putting AI chiefs in their C-Suites

In the last 12 months, brands like General Motors, Mastercard and ZocDoc have each appointed chief AI officers while agency holding companies like Stagwell, subsidiaries like Golin and indie shops like Luckie & Co. and Horizon Media have done the same. Adtech firms are in on the trend – Zefr hired a CAIO in February 2024 – as are B2B giants like PwC, S&P and Accenture.

The appointments come as companies look to move beyond experimenting with AI, and find ways to actually realize the business efficiencies they hope it can deliver – it’s become tablestakes. They’re finding they need a driving personality to get those changes off the deck and into motion.

The executives hired into those roles range from veterans fluent in the language of machine learning and the pre-generative era of AI, to media chiefs and agency founders brought onboard when their businesses were acquired by a holding company. Daniel Hulme, WPP’s AI chief and co-founder of Satalia, is an example of the latter.

As WPP’s CAIO, Hulme said his role comprises several key areas — making the “right AI bets,” reinventing operational processes, overseeing AI ethics and governance and collaborating with the C-Suite on AI-related decisions. He’s also tasked with tracking emerging AI innovations and trends from academia and the corporate sector. “If something is a surprise to me, then I’m not doing my job properly,” he said. 

He also oversees an internal research group called Conscium, founded last year to explore areas like AI consciousness, ethics and experimental areas like “neuromorphic” computing – computing designs inspired by the way the human brain functions.

“My job is to really understand what are the right algorithms to solve the right problems,” Hulme said. “Are algorithms going to enable us to be differentiated or are they going to be circumvented by other algorithms sometime in the future? Placing the right bets in the short-, medium- and long-term is part of my role.”

Another newly appointed CAIO is Wesley ter Haar, co-founder of Monks, who entered the role in February alongside his role as chief revenue officer. To promote the move and recruit more AI talent, the S4 Capital-owned agency also recently created a chatbot based on ter Haar.

“In every industry there’ll be a percentage of companies that figure [AI] out, then a large percentage of companies that don’t,” ter Haar said. “And I think the economic upside to figuring it out makes for such a big competitive gap.”

The CAIO role combines a wide range of skills. They’re often asked to act as client-facing frontmen, tech visionaries guiding an organization into the future, and gamblers betting on which tech supplier or LLM developer has the right tech.

“A CAIO needs to balance innovation with accountability, helping the organization scale AI in a way that’s both impactful and sustainable,” said Dan Priest, PwC’s CAIO in the U.S, in an email.

On top of all that, they’re also tasked with navigating the internal tensions involved with bringing AI to staffers on the corporate front line who may be fearful of automation, while translating the ambitions of CEOs into reality. “Collaboration is key, whether that’s with technical teams, business leaders, or external partners,” added Priest, who previously worked as Toyota’s chief information officer.

“Having a ‘Head of AI’ shows clients and prospects that agencies are committed to meeting client demand for data-driven solutions,” Gartner analyst Nicole Greene said in an email. 

So, where do they fit in? Some are heading up teams directly, while others occupy floating roles across their organization. Priest works directly with PwC’s chief commercial officer, for example. “My work is largely focused on supporting clients and advancing their AI strategies,” he said.

In some cases, as with agency holding company Stagwell, CAIOs report directly to CEOs. John Kahan, a decades-long AI veteran of Microsoft and IBM, was hired this month and will work directly under Stagwell boss Mark Penn. He told Digiday that the role has been designed to plug into Stagwell’s central Marketing Cloud division and across its portfolio, but it won’t come with its own department. “I don’t need to hire a big team to manage in this environment,” he said.

Meanwhile AT&T’s CAIO Andy Markus – formerly an executive at WarnerMedia and Turner – pairs his role with the position of chief data officer and heads up a 950-strong department, under the guidance of the firm’s CTO Jeremy Legg. “We enable and empower business units within AT&T to reimagine how they work with a Data and AI first mindset,” he said in an email.

One key dividing line between CAIOs is their exposure to customers. Some, like Kahan and Markus, occupy internal-facing positions with a brief to roll out AI technology across their organization. Others, like PwC’s Priest, look outwards.

“Lately, there’s been a lot of interest from our clients on AI agents. These kinds of capabilities are exciting, but they also come with questions around integration, oversight, and trust,” he said.

Beyond advertising giants, smaller agencies have also recently added CAIOs or similar roles, including Tim Rich, who took on the role of head of AI at Horizon Media last May. Another is Luckie & Co., which named Mark Unrein as CAIO last fall. Previously the agency’s svp of operations, Unrein took on the new brief last year.

He now splits his time between guiding internal AI adoption and working on client-facing AI education. “We refer to ourselves as informed navigators for challenger brands,” said Unrein.

Since his new brief, the agency has begun exploring custom integrations for LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT, and visual tools like TypeFace and Adobe Firefly.

This isn’t the first time execs have carved new job titles to catch a fresh tech wave — chief metaverse officer isn’t a title that’s aged well – but the number and variety of companies adding CAIOs suggests a tectonic shift AI poses for the C-Suite beyond a passing phase.

Summed up Priest: “It’s not about chasing hype; it’s about long-term impact.”