A recent survey of nearly 2,000 leaders in five key functions—finance; human resources; legal and compliance; marketing, sales, and strategy; and supply chain and operations—shows that they are, on the whole, aligned on priorities for AI use and the challenges it presents. This suggests that leadership teams are pulling together to address a technology moving with unprecedented speed.

Executives indicate that AI is rapidly becoming a part of daily business and is being measured for its contributions like any other investment.

Across functions, it’s still hard for companies to find the AI talent they need. As leaders seek to use AI for a broadening range of tasks and projects—eventually rewiring business processes across the enterprise—we expect high demand for AI-specific expertise at all levels to continue for three to six years. 

In the long run, it seems likely demand will follow a pattern similar to that in earlier waves of computing innovation, from personal computing to cloud, in which specific technical expertise was in high demand during the transition, but then declined as the relevant knowledge became a part of every person’s role. In other words, we expect that basic working knowledge of AI will be as fundamental an expectation for senior leaders as being digitally savvy is today.

That said, we also expect every enterprise will have a senior leader responsible for the AI strategy and for AI platforms and tools.