| Kunal Anand knows firsthand about the shifting titles and responsibilities for a company’s technology. He’s worked at cybersecurity company F5 for about a year and a half, but he’s already had two big positions. He was hired as the chief technology and AI officer, but last November, his title transitioned to chief innovation officer as he started running the product innovation, vision and strategy organization. He’d created an AI center of excellence at the company soon after he was hired, but as that area became more well established—and run by someone else—the AI portion of his title was dropped, and there is no more CAIO. I talked to Anand about how titles are evolving in the tech space, and how companies and executives should define these roles. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. A couple of years ago, many companies started creating chief AI officer positions. Is that still a trend, and do you think companies need a person in that kind of role? Anand: I’m not seeing that trend as much anymore, especially in general technology enterprises and our industry. I’m actually seeing almost the opposite. I’m seeing that combination of CPO— the chief product officer and chief technology officer—come together now more than ever before. I’m seeing that happen across enterprise security, cybersecurity. It’s going to be decentralized the same way that technology has been decentralized inside of an organization. The CTO role, it’s clear that over the last couple of decades, has evolved, too. That’s why you sometimes see a split in organizations of a CTO versus an executive vice president or an SVP of engineering. Two different things, where one may set strategy and vision, versus one may be focused on execution. I think we are seeing with AI, every function embracing the technology. If it gives you leverage, a better way to think, a better way to build a better product or operate your business, of course you’re going to use it. CIOs or CEOs are telling me that they’re really pushing their own teams, their C levels, their directs, to embrace the technology. It’s not really culminating to a focal chief AI officer. I’m finding that it’s more diffused now, and we’ll see how it evolves over time. What’s in a title? Are titles like chief AI officer created to actually handle everything related to that area, or is it more for the company to show its priorities? We also saw this in the cloud era, where there were chief cloud officers. With new and breakthrough technology, there’s always been a moment where a company has to decide if they’re going to be on the early side of it, or if they’re going to wait until it matures a little bit more. When a company decides that they’re going to embrace something, there’s three ways you go about that. One is you signal it top down. I think that’s something that you get from a role like this, which is, ‘We’re taking this seriously, everybody. We’re going to go and either hire a bunch of resources or we’re going to collect resources within the organization across multiple departments and bring it in.’ I think both cloud and AI require a generalist, because if you’re a chief AI officer of the entire organization, even to a technology company, it’s not limited to product. It’s not limited to the technology you build. It’s also how is your Salesforce using these tools? How are your G&A functions in finance? The level of depth there is unique. The second way that they can drive that change, whether it’s with cloud, AI or other breakthrough technology, is they get that embedded into their teams. Which is, ‘In your roadmaps, you’re going to be required to have X percent of your deliverables contain AI or be powered by AI in some way, shape or form.’ That’s a common thing that I see in tech companies. That is a very dangerous thing to do, to just say that everything must be AI-powered. You’re just hopping from trend to trend, and you’re not really thinking about the customer problem. I think we’re starting to see a little bit of this now. Everyone is doing an AI-powered thing. The third way is more of a financial incentive, which is inside of your objectives. You’re going to be evaluated based on your ability to embrace this technology—which is why you see people now talk more about the number of developers that are using AI in their organization, how productive they are. It’s hard to know if it’s a flex when a company says those stats publicly. Who cares if you’ve got X percent of your developers using AI? Ultimately, it’s all got to be in service of pulling together and putting a great product out there for your customers to use. I think we’ll see more of these as breakthroughs come. It’s AI today. I know we’re calling it ‘super intelligence’ now. I think that’s the framing that we should be using. I don’t know if we’ll see a chief super intelligence officer or something like that at some point, but I think you always have to just be cautious about jumping on these trends. If someone who works in the technology area is asked their opinion about what kind of role and title they should have, what should they look at to determine what would be best for their company? For us, we felt that it’s really important as a technology company to always be innovative. It’s what we have to do. Innovation doesn’t mean you’re only doing new and shiny things, like you’re playing only with AI. Innovation is comprehensive. That’s the one thing to break apart. For every company, you always have to think about: How do I improve my current products? How do I continue solving these customer problems? How do I draw the map of where we are today, versus where we want to go? And then how do I design that path on that map to get there? I think you can frame it. You can either build the company around a specific technology, which is what some do, or you can build it around a customer. And if you build it around a customer, that’s going to force you to innovate. If I look at the largest companies out there, if you look at the Magnificent Sevens today, you look at them as continuing to listen to the customer solving a problem or a pain point. They solve the next one. Nvidia is a great example of this, where they went from solving critical issues on GPUs, to solving data center problems, to evolving to solve AI problems, and then solving networking problems. They’re solving problems and they’re innovating their business: their core go-to-market, their core product and technology. For us, that is a very important thing that we must do, and it’s something that we’re paying a lot of attention to. I think a lot of companies should take a step back and evaluate: Are we just going to be focused on a very narrow set of technologies or a narrow set of products, or are we going to be really focused on solving customer problems? That will take us to different places, and it’s likely going to be the most durable thing. As technology comes, technology goes, but solving those customer problems and iterating with them is important. For that very reason, you have to combine the product and the vision. | 
