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Since the start of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, and the subsequent AI revolution, workers in all industries have been hit by massive layoffs.
A new report published by IBM last week, however, shows that AI is reshaping living rooms and how CEOs make decisions.
The report says that 76% of the more than 2,000 organizations surveyed have established a chief executive officer’s office – that of a chief AI officer (CAIO) – up from 26% by 2025.
Analysts and experts have expressed concern about the potential for a labor crisis arising from the spread of AI across the corporate sector.
“AI is driving what could be the biggest organizational change since the industrial and digital revolutions,” Vivek Lath, a partner at McKinsey & Company, told CNBC.
The IBM report also found that AI was deepening the impact of one of the most established C-suite positions, as 59% of respondents expect the influence of the chief human resources officer (CHRO) to increase.
Blurred lines
As AI has matured, the question of its ownership on board has led to a confusing picture.
The existing list of technology-related roles, such as chief technology officer, chief information officer and chief data officer, have often introduced ambiguity about AI work at the senior level, according to Lian Jye Su, senior analyst at market research firm Omdia.
So with the emergence of challenges specific to AI adoption – questions of infrastructure, governance, integration, and workflow development – firms are increasingly starting to establish a dedicated CAIO office to oversee AI transformation, Su said.
This year alone, organizations such as HSBC and Lloyds Banking Group have made staff moves in this role.
But estimates of how many companies appoint CAIOs vary widely.
“Have we seen AI officials? Yes. Do I expect that to go mainstream? No, probably not,” said Jonathan Tabah, director of consulting at the consulting firm. Gartnerhe said.
Organizations that have appointed CAIOs “have chosen to be at the forefront of this innovation,” Tabah said, adding that creating new C-suite roles often carries significant costs, ones that not all companies can justify or afford.
In their report, IBM wrote that CAIOs “can empower calculated risk-taking across the organization,” while setting clear goals for AI transformation and guidelines that “allow teams to accelerate without getting out of control.”
McKinsey sees the responsibility to ensure the coordination of AI efforts across the company as more important than the creation of a specific topic, Lath said.
But the mandate of offices like that of the CAIO tends to vary across organizations, and often changes over time, according to Randy Bean, an industry consultant and author of the 2026 AI & Data Leadership Executive Benchmark Survey.
The real question, according to Bean, is whether the nascent CAIO role will be “temporary,” potentially folded into other senior portfolios once the AI revolution matures, or permanent.
It’s a labor question
“The senior HR executive is in a unique position to influence the talent management, acquisition, and training processes within the organization,” says Omdia’s Su, adding that employee learning about AI is often a “significant hurdle” for many firms.
Similarly, in Bean’s 2026 AI and Data Leadership study, 93.2% of respondents cited “cultural challenges,” rather than technical limitations, as the primary barrier to AI adoption.
Analysts, such as Gartner’s Tabah, see AI’s potential for automation as an opportunity to push HR departments into more important roles. “This [an] a chance to break free at last [HR departments] for working and stepping up and being strategic leaders,” he said.
But Tabah also warned that the opposite could happen. “If HR in your organization doesn’t have a strategy, and it’s primarily a functional function, you’re going to be thrown into a more functional role – it’s going to be automatic.”
More prominent, however, may be how executives are dealing with the human implications of AI-led disruption.
“In the short term, I expect the top roles to face the least disruption … they’re the most locked in to AI,” Tabah said. “That doesn’t mean they’re absolved of the burden of knowing how to use it or run its implementation, but in terms of the impact of their immediate operations, they’re going to be more vulnerable.”
C-suite roles, however, often resist direct coding: tasks like strategic judgment and stakeholder management are difficult to outsource to AI algorithms.
“The other part of the answer is [C-suite executives] they have more control over where the impact of AI is felt, so they have a greater ability to protect themselves from disruption,” Tabah added.
Year to date, more than 101,000 tech workers have been laid off worldwide, according to Layoffs.fyi estimates. With more than 20,000 job cuts reported across all firms Meta again Microsoft in April, analysts have begun to see these layoffs as a sign of things to come.
On Thursday, Bain & Company published a report estimating that software-as-a-service firms — some of the most affected by new AI capabilities — stand to reap an estimated $100 billion in revenue “by turning labor costs into software use by automating the workflow.”
“We’re not suggesting that there’s no labor impact. I think we’re just saying that the world doesn’t need another word … to talk about that without putting the context of the good things that are being done, which is that there’s a lot of work being done, freeing people up to do other things,” David Crawford, a Bain management consultant, told CNBC.
