# The Paradox of the Chief AI Officer Here’s a funny thing about the role of the Chief AI Officer. The better they do their job, the less necessary they become. When AI is new and misunderstood—when it’s mostly slide decks, headlines, and FOMO—you need someone to be the translator. Someone to cut through the noise. Someone to make the business case and build the muscle. That’s what a good CAIO does. They evangelize, educate, and operationalize. But if they’re *really* good—if they succeed in making AI part of how the company works, thinks, and decides—then their role should, at some point, fade out. Because here’s the paradox: > **The usefulness of a Chief AI Officer is inversely proportional to the usefulness of AI itself.** The more embedded AI becomes, the less you need a single person in charge of it. The goal isn’t to create a little AI kingdom off to the side. The goal is to build a world where *every team*, *every process*, *every employee* is augmented. A world where AI is just part of the system—like the internet, or electricity. Invisible infrastructure. And in that world, having a Chief AI Officer is kind of like having a Chief Electricity Officer. It starts to feel weird. Now, I’m not saying the role has no value. In fact, it’s *critically* valuable in the early stages. When an organization is still figuring out what’s real and what’s hype, a CAIO can save years of thrashing. They can set guardrails. Build trust. Deliver wins that matter. But their real job—maybe their only job—is to work themselves out of a job. A great CAIO doesn’t build an empire. They build an ecosystem. And once it’s working, once the flywheel is spinning, once the org stops asking “What’s our AI strategy?” and starts asking “How do we do this *faster, better, smarter* with AI?”—they’ve done it. They’ve made themselves obsolete. And that’s the win. --- *Thanks for reading. If you're building AI into your org and wrestling with questions like this, I'm always up for a conversation.*