Chief AI Officers Are Emerging as Lynchpin in AI Success

Dell executives urge business leaders in the Asia-Pacific region to establish the position of chief artificial intelligence officer and adopt a “top-down” approach to implementing artificial intelligence.

While early adopters in 2024 will primarily be experimenting with AI in production, Dell expects a key shift in 2025, with more enterprises transitioning from proof-of-concept programs to deploying AI as core projects. Provide measurable return on investment.

John Roese, Dell’s global chief technology officer and chief artificial intelligence officer, emphasized at a media briefing that the main challenge in the region is not the technical feasibility of artificial intelligence, but creating the right organizational strategies and frameworks to ensure successful adoption.

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

The rise of the chief AI role in Asia Pacific

Peter Marrs, Dell’s president for Asia Pacific, Japan and Greater China, explained at the briefing how he meets regularly with chief technology officers and CEOs in the region. As recently as November 2024, Marrs observed signs of an overloaded AI project, with one client managing More than 300 artificial intelligence projects At the same time.

“I see some of the largest clients in the world, they don’t have this strategy locked in, they’re still swinging it around,” Marrs said.

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To overcome these challenges, an increasing number of companies in the Asia-Pacific region are appointing chief AI officers to guide their AI strategies, Marrs said. This is expected to bring more consistency and focus to enterprise AI strategies.

“We’re now seeing a lot of customers, especially more mature enterprise customers, investing in chief AI chiefs,” he noted.

While they also appoint AI councils made up of representatives from business units such as marketing, software development and manufacturing, these business units are ultimately led by a chief AI officer.

“Sometimes CIOs play a dual role, but we are seeing more and more companies investing in a CIO or chief AI officer to help them develop their strategy and path forward around AI implementation.”

Benefits of implementing a “top-down” approach to artificial intelligence

Roese said the biggest issue for companies rolling out artificial intelligence is no longer the technology or approach, and Dell believes it has solved that problem for customers. The “artificial intelligence factory” model and method defined by it.

Instead, Ross said, “We still see a problem that has nothing to do with technology, and that’s organizational complexity. What to do [AI] It’s becoming increasingly clear, but how to organize a company to do that successfully is a really important and active conversation right now,” he explained.

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

Roese said Dell has been “very thoughtful” about building artificial intelligence in-house. The company has taken steps to ensure that all AI projects are “top-down and strategic.” With 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 know that it’s impossible for all business leaders to agree on the most important AI projects to implement because all of these projects are important to our business leaders,” Roese explained. “But our ability to implement them is limited to a few at a time.”

Roese is a strong proponent of a top-down approach rather than a “bottom-up” approach. While a bottom-up approach for business units to create and implement AI projects can foster innovation and experimentation, without clear oversight and guidance, it can lead to misaligned priorities and inefficiencies. Ross warned that this approach “cannot happen in organizations.”

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ROI will soar in 2025

According to Dell, the first wave Return on investment in artificial intelligence will begin next year. Roese said this will come in the form of savings, revenue, profit improvements or significant changes in outcomes, and is the result of the past two years of experimentation in figuring out how to use artificial intelligence effectively.

“We’ve seen that most of the AI ​​tools needed for enterprise AI have become standardized and turnkey,” he explained. “You don’t need to build your own coding assistant. You can just buy one and implement it locally. There is now a clear way to implement artificial intelligence.

“What we learned is that If you choose the right projects and handle them in the right waywith significant business impact in terms of hard ROI. This is important because companies don’t like to jump into an area where they have no evidence that they will succeed.