SINGAPORE – Banks from Sydney to London are racing to fill the senior role of chief AI officer, a job that barely existed a year ago. Those in the position, however, say it might not be around for long.
Leaders at HSBC Holdings, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Lloyds Banking Group started in top artificial intelligence roles over the past three months. The jobs can command salaries of nearly US$3.5 million (S$4.5 million) per year and come with relatively hard to find skill sets, forcing firms to often lure bankers from their competitors.
The movement of senior talent and the scope of the job has prompted a discussion about its potentially limited shelf life. The thinking is that as bankers become more adept at using agents and AI software in their daily work, the AI chief role might not be required in years to come.
“Any chief AI officer should operate on the premise that they should not have a role in the future,” said David Hardoon, who left Standard Chartered in March after less than one year in the role as global head of AI enablement. “Do we have a chief Excel officer? Do we have a chief email officer? No,” he added.
The share of organisations with a chief AI officer climbed to 76 per cent in 2026 from 26 per cent in 2025, according to the IBM Institute for Business Value, which surveyed 2,000 chief executives in 33 countries across 21 industries.
In Singapore, heads of AI now rank among the fastest-growing areas for job listings, according to LinkedIn data, even as demand for specialist tech talent outpaces supply.
The movements point to a thin bench of executives commanding median pay packages of around US$1.6 million, with top earners approaching US$3.5 million, according to data research firm Equilar. Exact salaries are rarely disclosed.
The rush also reflects deeper concerns within organisations. Banks that struggle to integrate AI risk losing clients, market share and talent to rivals. Still, appointing a chief AI officer doesn’t guarantee success and the institutions now scrambling to fill the role often disagree on what the job actually involves.
The role serves several purposes at once, said Chua Pei Ying, head economist for Asia-Pacific at LinkedIn.
“The first is someone to actually make sense of what your company’s AI strategy is,” she said in an interview. Every company’s strategy is different, and “sometimes an AI strategy entails decisions to do and not to do,” she said.
Part of that work is deciding who is responsible for AI training inside a bank and deciding whether it sits within the human resources department, a digital division or with the chief technology officer, Chua said. Broad, company-wide rollouts tend to fall to HR, while more specialised programmes may sit elsewhere, she added.
Some senior leaders say the job will eventually get swallowed up inside firms. Zhao Peng, chief executive officer of Citadel Securities, said chief AI officer roles will not be necessary in the long run because AI will become part of the technology stack the way smartphones and personal computers did.
“We don’t have head of mobile devices,” he told a gathering at the Global Financial Leaders’ Investment Summit in Hong Kong in November.
For now, business schools sell courses around the title. They include the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business offering a chief AI officer programme priced around US$28,000 for a 10-month course. Duke University, Cornell University and the University of Michigan have introduced similar offerings that are typically tailored to mid-career professionals looking to bolster their skills.
“The rate of growth in this role is insane,” said Matt Cohn, senior director of programme strategy innovation at the University of Chicago. “A lot of our students are founders, chief executive officers, chief strategy officers, and they’re like, I need the skills of a chief AI officer.”
Industry veteran, Ranil Boteju, who left Lloyds to become the first chief AI officer at Australia’s largest lender, Commonwealth Bank, reckons AI will become “invisible,” embedded in everything a bank does within about a decade – much the way electricity is. BLOOMBERG
