Last month, at a dinner with a group of chief strategy officers, I remarked that companies tend to create a new c-suite role anytime they want to signal they’re serious about the latest disruptive trend. One of my dinner companions observed there were once chief electrical officers, then chief e-commerce officers and chief digital officers. The newest must-have c-suite title is now the chief AI officer. There’s a new one, it seems, every year.
These roles are rational. They emerge when a capability becomes too critical to leave management of it scattered across the enterprise. But these revolving job titles also reveal a problematic habit: When disruption arrives, companies often react by naming the trend instead of redesigning the institution.
What companies need most is not another narrow specialist role, but a chief disruption officer who leads the systematic work needed to help organizations manage the disruption du jour.
Titles matter because language drives behavior. If you call someone a chief AI officer, the organization may assume the challenge is technical. If you call someone a chief digital officer, people may assume it’s about tools or sales channels. But if you call someone a chief disruption officer, you are declaring that the company must continually challenge its own assumptions before the market does, and it matters enough for someone to lead it. That framing shifts the conversation from adoption to reinvention, from pilots to portfolio choices, and from innovation theater to institutional change.
Unlike earlier technological disruptions, AI is more than a tool. It is rapidly becoming a force that upends product design, commercial execution, customer experience, talent strategy, business models, and so much more. Executive attention to AI has surged as adoption shifts from early experiments to scaled, operational transformation. Meanwhile, CEO accountability for AI is rising sharply, with half of all CEOs believing their jobs are at risk if they don’t get AI right.
The need for a chief disruption officer is especially clear in industrial and technology businesses, the world I know best. In these environments, disruption rarely arrives in neat packaging. It shows up as a shift in customer economics, a new technology stack, an adjacent entrant with a better business model, or a product architecture that no longer fits the future. Strategy in these settings is about deciding what will drive your competitive edge in the future, which capabilities will matter next, what the portfolio should become, and how fast the organization can move.
My own experience at industrial and electronics companies has reinforced this lesson repeatedly. At IDEX, my mandate was not simply to optimize a portfolio but to support the CEO and board to unlock growth, build out mergers and acquisitions, reorganize the company, and develop an AI agenda. At Vontier, the challenge was to help a newly public company rethink its traditional business and move toward electrification and next-generation mobility. At Harman International, the work involved anticipating what’s next in connectivity, autonomy, safety, and more, then translating that into strategy, capital allocation, and portfolio moves.
In every case, the problem was bigger than technology adoption. The problem was enterprise reinvention.
AI exposes not just capability gaps, but gaps in your company’s operating model, leadership, and business model. A chief disruption officer can help close those gaps. Such a role would not “own AI” in the narrow sense, but ensure the organization treats AI as a catalyst for reinvention rather than one more layer of technology to add.
Managing AI transformation means everyone in the c-suite asking harder questions: Which parts of the business’s portfolio become stronger because of AI? Where can AI create lasting product differentiation rather than temporary productivity gains? Which organizational habits will quietly suffocate the very transformation we claim to want?
These questions are particularly important in legacy industrial companies. AI may improve internal productivity, but the larger prize is often strategic: smarter products, faster innovation cycles, stronger commercial insight, and more selective capital allocation. In many cases, leaders who hold strategy roles do a lot of integrated work that, in essence, repositions the company’s portfolio for growth. That is disruption work, whether or not the title says so.
Some may argue this is simply the CEO’s job, or perhaps the chief strategy officer’s. Some of the work, such as which processes and decisions should be automated, augmented, or left to human expertise, is done by chief people officers, whose roles are increasingly critical for AI transformation.
But in practice, CEOs are stretched thin managing external stakeholders and operational outcomes. Strategy leaders, as staffed today, see the future clearly but do not have the authority to rewire incentives, operating models, and execution. A strategy officer redesigned as a chief disruption officer, however, can have that authority if they are close enough to the CEO to help them shape their choices and embedded enough with operators to change execution.
If every new technological wave produces another specialized executive leader, the c-suite will become a museum of past disruptions. AI is the latest disruption, and perhaps the most consequential, because it amplifies all the changes that came before it. The organizations that win will not be the ones with the most fashionable executive titles. They will be the ones that build a repeatable system for managing disruption.
Roopa Unnikrishnan is the author of The Career Catapult and will publish a book on strategy in 2027. Most recently, she was senior vice president and chief strategy and innovation officer of IDEX Corporation.