June 9, 2026
Don't hire a Chief AI Officer
You're getting pressure.
Your board saw a McKinsey report. Your CHRO forwarded a LinkedIn post. Three of your peers already hired one. You feel behind.
I'm going to save you €200,000 a year.
Don't hire a Chief AI Officer.
I know how that sounds. Let me explain why.
The technology moved too fast. Nobody has more than 2 years of experience with this. The person you're about to hire learned it at the same time as everyone else. They just learned it in a different company. Not yours.
Meanwhile, inside your building right now, someone is doing extraordinary things with these tools. You don't know who. They have zero reason to tell you.
20 to 30 percent of your people are using AI on the job. Most are hiding it. Seven or eight reasons why: they don't want to look lazy, they don't want to lose their edge, they know efficiency gains get translated into layoffs. So they keep quiet. Rational behavior.
Inside that group, 1 or 2 percent are doing something genuinely brilliant. Replacing workflows. Solving problems nobody could crack. Building things.
Those people understand your operations, your clients, your weird internal shortcuts that no consultant will ever learn. They already know where the fragile points are.
A Chief AI Officer brings you a framework.
Your 1 percent brings you solutions that actually work in the building they already know.
One costs €200K. The other costs creating the conditions for them to raise their hand.
How do you create those conditions? That's the actual question. And nobody from McKinsey is going to answer it for you.
PD: One company I know gave out €10,000 cash prizes every week to whoever automated their job the best. The ideas that came out in the first month would have taken a consulting firm two years. Real money. Real results. No frameworks.
PD: If you recognized the room, bring me the room. We will look at what is actually holding it together.