American business schools are training professionals for a C-suite role that many companies are still figuring out. Programs for chief AI officers are drawing executives, strategy leaders and other experienced professionals even as there is little agreement on what the job will ultimately require.According to a report by Bloomberg, Nancy Schieber spent 12 hours developing a 65-page artificial intelligence (AI) transformation strategy modelled on Ogilvy, the advertising agency where she worked for 13 years. The work was part of her University of Chicago Booth School of Business class and came as she tried to understand a job market that had changed while she was away from advertising.After stepping away from advertising for several years to raise her children, Schieber returned to a workplace increasingly shaped by AI. She paid $28,000 for Booth’s 10-month Chief AI Officer program, joining a growing group of professionals seeking training for an emerging position.“I’m 50,” Schieber told Bloomberg from her home in Chicago. “I don’t want to be behind the ball on this.”
Companies are adding AI roles
The demand for people responsible for AI has increased quickly. The share of organisations with a chief AI officer rose to 76% from 26% in a single year, according to an IBM Institute of Business Value survey of 2,000 chief executive officers worldwide.Those CEOs expect AI to make almost half of all operational decisions without human intervention by 2030. That expectation is forcing companies to reconsider how AI responsibilities should fit into their executive structures.Business schools have moved to meet that demand. Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business offers a half-year course costing $25,000, while Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy has a seven-month chief data and AI officer program priced at $17,850.Some companies are paying for employees to take the programs and use what they learn on AI projects already underway. Recruiters are also beginning to look at graduates before they have completed their courses.Matt Cohn, senior director of program strategy and innovation at the University of Chicago, says founders, CEOs and strategy officers are among those enrolling because they want a better understanding of AI.“Firms were racing to hire someone to lead their AI programs and making room for the role in the C-suite and in their budgets,” he says. “But they were often not getting the results that they wanted. That tracks with the story of AI generally: enormous interest, a sense of enormous potential, pressure to move fast and often no clear business case for how the investment moves the needle.”Cohn says the program “can’t promise a recipe book with the 10 steps to become a successful” chief AI officer. Instead, it is designed to give participants the “knowledge and skills they need to form their own points of view.”
The job is still taking shape
Booth’s classes are held over Zoom on Tuesdays and Thursdays in 90-minute sessions. Each cohort has between 50 and 60 students from the US and abroad.The seven modules cover AI strategy and organisational readiness, followed by data infrastructure, deployment, scaling and implementation. The course then moves into governance and security, and C-suite leadership.Classes are taught by industry practitioners rather than full-time faculty. Their backgrounds include finance, healthcare and technology.
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