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Consulting firm PwC announced Tuesday its first US chief AI officer: company veteran Dan Priest, a partner who has led efforts on cloud and digital transformation strategy, and previously served as a CIO before joining PwC more than a decade ago.
“The role is decidedly client- and market-focused, although it includes the full scope of our business, and so our number one priority is to make sure that we’re trusted partners for our clients as they navigate this complex AI landscape,” Priest said.
In his role as CAIO, Priest said he will oversee the firm’s assurance, tax business, and advisory businesses as he bolsters existing offerings and develops new ones as the technology evolves.
“We believe AI is becoming intrinsic, and so it’ll become a natural part of everything we make and everything we do, and so we’re engineering it into our back office, we’re engineering it into our ways of working, and I will be guiding those efforts as well,” he said.
PwC already has relationships with all the major players in the AI space, he said, pointing to its deal with OpenAI in May as an example.
Priest’s background as a technologist, mixed with his work in business strategy, tee him up to tackle this new purview, since corporate AI transformation requires strategic planning and implementation beyond the tech.
“We think it goes beyond a technology play. We think it’s intrinsic to next generation business strategies, and the winners are going to be the ones who know how to change their [operational] models,” he said. Though, as a former CIO, Priest told HR Brew he brings that knowledge with him to the role, too.
Zoom out. And as Priest joins the C-suite at PwC, he’s also joining a growing number of executives responsible for overseeing the AI technology adoption across corporate America.
According to a recent report from Foundry, 15% of enterprise companies have already named a chief AI officer. Another 24% are looking to fill that role.
CAIOs help bring this technology to organizations responsibly and in a manner that best leverages its potential. Because the impacts of AI touch nearly all parts of the organization, it's important to identify a senior leader responsible for coordinating the transformation, Priest said.
“The very clear reason for why we thought it was necessary to have a chief AI officer is the impact and the potential to our business,” Priest said. “When we looked at how we expected AI to impact our financial performance, and what we were able to do for clients, there’s both important threats and really big opportunities that need to be responsibly managed.”