The Officer of Last Resort

"We are hiring a Chief AI Officer. Don't look for a top AI expert."Michael Maeder, a partner in executive search at August Leadership, reports this as the clearest instruction he received from a client, and he is right to have treated it as the clue it was. Most search assignments are order-filling. A specification arrives, the market is combed for people who resemble it, and the resemblance is mistaken for suitability—a process that has been described, accurately, as a machine for converting institutional anxiety into a shortlist. That this brief was interrogated rather than executed makes it unusual for an industry that over indexes on speed to fill, and the interrogation produced something genuinely useful. The client's pilots had worked. What frightened them was not failure but the far commoner fate of the successful experiment that never becomes operating reality. The technical capability was already in the building. What was absent was the capacity to prioritise across competing…