Microsoft recently explained that 66% of AI impact comes from organizational culture. IBM just told you that 76% of companies hired a Chief AI Officer this year. Neither of these is the headline. The headline is that you almost certainly hired the title before you designed the role, and now your Chief of Staff is quietly doing the job nobody assigned her. Again.

We've seen this movie before. Over and over. I've already had the popcorn and now I'm grabbing the Toblerone.

Allow me to set the scene. Your board started asking about AI strategy roughly eleven months ago, in a tone that suggested they'd just skimmed a McKinsey report on a layover from San Francisco. You nodded. You said the words "responsible deployment" twice. Then you did what every overwhelmed CEO eventually does and talked to the CEO in the building next door, who told you he'd just hired a Chief AI Officer, and said it with the absolute certainty of a man who hasn't actually thought about it.

So you hired one, too. Or you're about to. Or your board is currently drafting the press release without telling you.

You're probably right that you need something. You are almost certainly wrong about what.

The 2026 Work Trend Index landed two weeks ago, and the coverage focused on the wrong number. Everybody ran with productivity gains. The actual finding—the one buried in the methodology like a confession at the end of a Tony Soprano therapy session—is this:

Organizational culture accounts for 66% of AI impact. Only 14% of workers are rewarded for experimenting with AI.

Read that a few times. Pour something first, if you need to. I'll wait.

What Microsoft is politely diagnosing is what they’re calling a Transformation Paradox, and what I'd call, if I were feeling honest, a Carmela Soprano Problem. Carmela always knew. The goomar, the cash in the duck feed, the lawyer on retainer for the contingencies nobody discussed at dinner. The information was never the issue. The issue was that the household was built to never act on what she knew. No one was accountable for translating what Carmela knew into what the family did. So everybody just kept eating, the manicotti got cold, and the FBI got closer.

Your organization is eating manicotti.

You have engineers who cut their code review time in half this quarter using tools you didn't authorize. You have a finance lead running Excel models in twenty minutes that used to take her team a week. You have a marketing analyst who has quietly become a one-person agency. None of this shows up in your performance reviews. None of it shows up in your operating reviews. None of it is in your strategic plan. And then, on a perfectly ordinary Tuesday, you walk into a leadership meeting with the wounded confusion of a man who's just discovered his children grew up without him, and ask, "Why aren't we getting more out of AI?"

This is not a tooling problem. It is not a training problem. It is not a vibes problem, though I understand the temptation. It is a leadership design problem, and you almost certainly do not have the right person accountable for executing it. You probably don't have any person accountable for it, which is worse because at least the wrong person would be doing something.

In most organizations I walk into, the answer to "who owns the translation layer between employees using AI and the operating model rewarding it" is one of three flavors of nobody:

Nobody, but everybody talks about it. The CEO mentions it on earnings calls. The board nods.

Technically the new Chief AI Officer who was hired to do AI strategy, has now been quietly handed change management as a welcoming gift, and is sitting in her office Googling "how to influence without authority."

The Chief of Staff. Who has not been told this is her job, but is doing it anyway, because of course she is. Holding things together. Sort of like calling The Daily Show “the news.” Not structurally what it's supposed to be, but managing to do the job (mostly).

Option three is the one I see most. And it's almost working — in the way the Soprano household almost worked, right up until the cut to black.

On May 4th, IBM's Institute for Business Value dropped its CEO study. The headline finding: Chief AI Officer adoption jumped from 26% to 76% in twelve months.

A fifty-point jump. In a year. For a C-suite title.

I want you to close your eyes and remember the 2010s, when every company decided it needed a Chief Digital Officer. Remember how that ended? The title came first. The mandate came second, in a fight. The reporting line came third, after legal got involved. The actual operating definition of what the Chief Digital Officer did came roughly… never. Most CDOs were quietly rolled into the COO or CIO function by 2019. A few are still on LinkedIn pretending it was a promotion.

A fifty-point jump in twelve months is not a maturity signal. It is what title-first, design-second hiring looks like at scale. It is the corporate equivalent of Stefon describing Manhattan's hottest new club: this place has everything — a Chief AI Officer, a Chief Data Officer, a Chief Innovation Officer, a Head of AI Transformation, and one older adorable Japanese businessman in a vest who turns out to be the only person who actually understands the technology.

I have seen this play before. I have seen it specifically with the Chief of Staff role, which spent roughly 2017 through 2023 going through its own title race, and which has been spending 2024, 2025, and now 2026 paying the structural bill. The Chief of Staff role, in most companies that hired one early, is still being cleaned up. Reporting lines redrawn. Authority clarified. Decision rights documented. The title moved fast. The design has been crawling behind it ever since, dragging a pulled hamstring.

The CAIO is on the same trajectory, and it's going to be worse because the CAIO doesn't get hired into a clean executive layer. The CAIO gets hired into an executive bench that already includes the Chief of Staff, the CTO, the CIO, the CDO (data, not digital, this time, mostly), and increasingly a Chief Transformation Officer who was hired three months ago for reasons nobody can quite remember.

So here's the question I'm not seeing asked in the press, the LinkedIn discourse, or the panel I watched last week with three people who said the word "synergies" un-ironically:
Who owns AI strategy? Who owns AI integration? Who owns AI operations? And what, exactly, is the accountability boundary between the CAIO and the Chief of Staff?

Because right now, in most companies, the answer is a Venn diagram in which all three circles overlap completely and the resulting circle is on fire. And Smokey the Bear isn’t coming to remind anyone about safety.

Here is how, in the organizations Coul & Gold advises, this actually needs to break down:

AI Strategy. Where you place bets, what your multi-year thesis is, what you're explicitly not doing, belongs to the CAIO. Or to the CEO directly if no CAIO exists.

AI Integration. How the operating model actually changes, who reports what, what gets sunset, what gets resourced, what the human inside the workflow is now responsible for, belongs to the Chief of Staff. It almost always does. It is almost always under-designed.

AI Operations. Running the systems, MLOps, governance, security, the part that gets you on the front page of the Wall Street Journal if it goes wrong belongs to the CTO/CIO axis.

The most consequential, under-designed relationship in enterprise leadership right now is the CAIO–CoS interface. Strategy without integration is a deck. Integration without strategy is busywork. And half the companies I see have hired a CAIO without ever realizing that the integration question—the real question, the one that determines whether any of this works—is sitting on the Chief of Staff's desk, unstaffed, undefined, and untitled. Because AI is now a “Special Project” that doesn’t sit comfortably under anyone, so of course it’s going to fall to the Chief of Staff to figure it out.

To borrow from Don Draper, who was talking about something else but might as well have been talking about your reorg with a CAIO, “It's not a transformation. It's a corner office with new business cards and a slightly more expensive lamp.”

This is the part where most newsletters would suggest you "have a conversation with your leadership team about alignment." Which is exactly the kind of advice that makes Tony Soprano stare at his manicotti for a full minute and then order a different sandwich.

Here is what to actually do:

#1. Stop hiring titles. Start designing and architecting the roles you need for the problems you have. Before you post a CAIO requisition, write the one-page accountability document. What decisions does this person own outright? What decisions do they influence? What decisions should they not be anywhere near? If you cannot write that page in under ninety minutes — or, worse, you think you can just plug into AI and Claude will figure it out for you — you are not ready to hire the role. You are ready to fund a consulting engagement to figure out the role. (Hi. 👋🏻)

#2. Audit the Chief of Staff function you already have against the integration question, specifically. Most CoS roles were designed before generative AI was a board-level topic. Most CoS job descriptions still lead with the words communication and execution — words so structurally meaningless they could describe a golden retriever, a mid-level publicist, or a hostage negotiator. (I swear in one edition of this newsletter, I’m going to write an article entitled, “Tell Me What The Word ‘Strategy’ Actually Means.”) It will be important to architect the CoS role around the responsibilities it absorbs with respect to AI.

#3. Stop trying to draw the org chart and write the handoff instead. Anyone can name the three jobs: AI strategy, AI integration, AI operations. That's the easy part, and it's the part everyone stops at. The part nobody writes down is where one ends and the next begins. Strategy without integration is a deck. Integration without strategy is busywork. The whole game is the two seams between the three — and the one that decides whether any of this works is the seam between the CAIO and the Chief of Staff.

So here's the test. Finish this sentence out loud, in your next leadership meeting, "The CAIO hands the AI work to the Chief of Staff at the exact moment that ______." If nobody in the room can complete it, you've found your problem. It isn't a missing strategy or a missing title. It's a missing handoff—and there is already a person standing in the gap where it should be, doing the job, without the sentence ever having been written down.

So here is the offer, and it is the same one the body of this newsletter has been making for the last two thousand words. Someone has to write the sentence. The accountability document. The handoff. The line where the CAIO's work becomes the Chief of Staff's work. You can attempt the sentence test from section three yourself — and some of you already know the answer — or you can write it with people who have held the role from the inside and built the diagnostic architecture that explains why it fails.

That is Executive Advisory. An engagement built specifically for the CEO–Chief of Staff relationship: getting the role correctly scoped before anyone walks in the door, identifying whether the relationship in year one is tracking toward what you actually needed, or diagnosing precisely what has broken down if something already has. Every session produces working documents — a defined role scope, a trust architecture assessment, a mapped picture of how you operate as a leader and what that operating environment demands from the person next to you. Concrete outputs. Not better conversations.

If the first half of this newsletter described your organization with more precision than was comfortable, the next step is a conversation, not a purchase. Book a discovery call. Inside thirty minutes you will know whether this is a fit. If it is not, we will tell you that too.

Executive Advisory · Book a discovery call

Let's fill it in. On purpose. Before the next title hits the press release.

See you in two weeks, Rachael

P.S. If you're a Chief of Staff reading this and you've already mentally drafted the AI integration section of your role that nobody has officially asked you to write, feel free to forward this to your CEO. No note. Just the link. If they get it, they'll get it. If they don't, at least you have it in writing that you tried, and that will come up in your exit interview in eighteen months, which is approximately when the next CAIO will be quietly rolled into your portfolio anyway.