Chief AI Officers Are Emerging as Lynchpin in AI Success

Senior executives from Dell are urging enterprise leaders across the Asia-Pacific region to create chief AI officer roles and to adopt a “top-down” approach to AI implementation.

While 2024 has primarily seen early adopters experimenting with AI in production, Dell anticipates a pivotal shift in 2025, with more enterprises transitioning from proof-of-concept initiatives to deploying AI as core projects that deliver measurable returns on investment.

John Roese, Dell’s global chief technology officer and chief AI officer, emphasised in a media briefing that the region’s primary challenge is not the technical feasibility of AI but rather creating the right organisational strategy and framework to ensure successful adoption.

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“If you’re not the chief AI officer and you’re not empowered and supported by your board and your leadership, your ability to prioritise the right AI work in a company is limited,” he said. “You may not get any budget, you may not have control, and there may be competing AI efforts that are not the right ones.”

The rise of chief AI officer roles in Asia-Pacific

Peter Marrs, Dell’s president for the Asia Pacific, Japan, and Greater China region, explained at the briefing how he regularly meets with CTOs and CEOs across the region. As recently as November 2024, Marrs observed signs of AI project overload, with one customer managing over 300 AI projects simultaneously.

“I am seeing in some of the biggest customers in the world, where they don’t have that strategy locked down, they’re still kind of swinging all over the place,” Marrs said.

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To overcome these challenges, Marrs said more companies in APAC are now appointing chief AI officers to steer AI strategies. This is expected to bring more coherence and focus on enterprise AI strategies.

“We are seeing a lot of our customers right now, especially the more mature enterprise customers, making investments in chief AI officers,” he noted.

While they are also appointing AI committees with representation from business units, such as marketing, software development, and manufacturing, these business units are ultimately led by a chief AI officer.

“Sometimes the CIO is playing a dual role, but more and more we are seeing companies investing in CIOs or chief AI officers to help them on their strategy and path forward around their AI enablement.”

The benefits of the ‘top-down’ approach to implementing AI

Roese said the biggest issue for companies rolling out AI is no longer technology or methodology, which Dell believes it has solved for its customers with its defined “AI factory” model and approach.

Instead, Roese said: “The thing that is still an issue which we are seeing, which has nothing to do with technology, is organisational complexity. How to do [AI] is becoming clearer, but how to organise a company to do it successfully is the really big active conversation right now,” he explained.

Roese explained that even the most advanced companies are still struggling “to build the right organisational model to make sure they have an empowered leader” for AI “who can actually make strategic decisions.” This AI leadership role would involve confronting the reality that “some people won’t like those decisions” made about AI strategy and having the authority to enforce the chosen direction among business leaders.

Roese said Dell was “very thoughtful” about internally structuring its AI efforts. The business has implemented measures to ensure all AI projects are “top-down and strategic.” Leveraging this top-down approach, all AI projects and use cases now require approval from Roese, CIO Doug Schmidt, and COO Jeff Clarke.

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“We knew that it would be impossible to get a consensus amongst all the business leaders about what the single most important AI project was to go implement, because all of them are important to our business leaders,” Roese explained. “But our ability to implement them is limited to only a handful at a time.”

Roese strongly favors the top-down approach over the “bottom-up” option. While the bottom-up approach, where a business unit creates and implements an AI project, can foster innovation and experimentation, it may lead to misaligned priorities and inefficiencies without clear oversight and direction. Roese warned that this approach “cannot happen in the organisation.”

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Return on investment to spike in 2025

According to Dell, the first wave of AI return on investment will start next year. Roese said this will come in the form of savings, revenue, margin improvement, or significant changes in outcomes and result from having figured out through experimentation over the last two years how to use AI effectively.

“We have seen that most of the AI tools needed to do enterprise AI have become standardised and turnkey,” he explained. “You do not need to build your own coding assistant. You can simply buy one and implement one on premise. There is now a clear methodology for implementing AI.

“And what we have learned is, if you pick the right projects and approach them the right way, there is significant business impact in terms of hard ROI dollars. And that is important because enterprises do not like going first into an area where there is no proof they will be successful.”