Call it planned obsolescence for the C-suite: Several health IT leaders say the chief AI officer title is built to disappear, folded back into the CIO’s job once AI stops being a special initiative and starts being how the organization runs.
It’s an extension of an argument CIOs have already made. In a recent Becker’s survey of the 200 largest U.S. health systems, the standalone chief digital officer drew the most criticism as an unnecessary seat. Becker’s asked executives to take it one step further: which title actually vanishes in five years.
Vinay Bharel, senior vice president of IT operations and interim CIO of Philadelphia-based Temple Health, said his bet is the standalone chief AI officer — a role he sees as valuable today but temporary.
“The role has real value today as a catalyst: setting guardrails, bringing discipline to investment decisions and helping health systems move beyond a collection of disconnected pilots,” he said. “But I see it as a role for this moment, rather than a permanent fixture in the C-suite.”
Mr. Bharel said AI is already becoming embedded in clinical care, operations, research, the workforce and the patient experience, making it harder to separate from the data, cybersecurity, architecture, workflow design and change management needed to make it useful and safe at scale. He said leaders across the organization should be expected to understand where AI can add value, where it introduces risk and how it changes the nature of their teams’ work.
“Five years from now, AI should simply be part of how every major function in a health system operates,” he said. “If AI still requires its own chief at that point, it may be a sign that we are continuing to manage it as a special initiative rather than building it into the organization’s core capabilities.”
The most successful chief AI officer, Mr. Bharel said, may ultimately be the one who makes the standalone role unnecessary.
Lisa Stump, executive vice president and chief digital information officer at New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System, reached the same conclusion by comparing AI’s trajectory to earlier waves of technology.
“The chief AI officer title is the most likely to disappear within five years,” she said. “AI is following the same path as the internet, cloud, and mobile technologies before it. It starts as a distinct discipline but eventually becomes embedded in everything.”
Ms. Stump said organizations will eventually stop treating AI as a separate function and instead build it into strategy, operations, care delivery, research, education and every major technology platform — at which point standalone AI leadership becomes less necessary because AI becomes everyone’s responsibility.
Nigam Shah, MD, PhD, chief data scientist at Palo Alto, Calif.-based Stanford Health Care, arrived at the same answer through a different argument: accountability. He said an AI model only creates value as a “prediction-action pairing,” requiring enough lead time, a workflow that works, the capacity to deliver it and a fair way to allocate it — and whoever is accountable for that pairing has to own the workflow and the budget behind it.
“A chief who owns the technology but not the care model cannot close the ROI loop, and once evaluation and monitoring sit inside the CIO and quality apparatus where they belong, the separate title becomes a coordination tax for the organization,” Dr. Shah said.
Ryan Cameron, EdD, chief information and innovation officer at Children’s Nebraska, agreed the C-suite is headed toward consolidation, but pointed to a different title as the one already fading: the chief digital officer.
“A decade ago, digital transformation was still relevant and needed in healthcare organizations,” Dr. Cameron said. “Today, most organizations have digital front doors, data warehouses, mobile-first engagement, telehealth, portals … and many other excellent modern resources.”
Dr. Cameron said it seems natural that the chief digital officer becomes increasingly focused on AI, automation and related technologies rather than digitization, and that smaller organizations may ultimately see the CIO absorb the AI title entirely rather than the two roles ever splitting apart.
“At Children’s Nebraska we are already operating much closer to that future-state model than a traditional CIO,” he said.
He said the more useful question for the industry may not be whether CIOs survive, but how much of AI, innovation, analytics and digital transformation ultimately reports to them.
“My bet is: most of it,” he said.
