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How to Hire a Chief AI Officer in Australia

25 September 2026 · Updated 1 October 2026

To hire a Chief AI Officer in Australia, start by writing down what the business needs AI to change in the first year. The title tells you very little on its own. Screen for technical grounding, change leadership and commercial judgement together, then headhunt. Advertising won’t work here: the title barely existed five years ago, and most people who can do the job are employed under a different one.

Most boards that decide they need a Chief AI Officer hit the same wall in the first week: there’s no template for the job ad. Write “5+ years’ experience as a Chief AI Officer” and you’ve disqualified almost the entire country. Copy a Chief Data Officer brief and rename it, and you’ll likely hire someone excellent at governance who can’t get the business to change how it works. This role is being invented as it’s being filled, and so is the hiring process.

Headhuntly is based on the Gold Coast and hunts Chief AI Officers nationally.

In this guide

Why are Chief AI Officer hires picking up in Australia?

Government set the pace. Under the AI Plan for the Australian Public Service, every agency was required to appoint a Chief AI Officer from its existing senior leadership by July 2026 (Department of Finance). Separately, version 2.0 of the Policy for the responsible use of AI in government, in effect since 15 December 2025, requires non-corporate Commonwealth entities to name accountable officials for AI and keep an internal register of AI use cases.

The government splits the job in two. Accountable officials own governance. The Chief AI Officer finds the opportunities and drives the cultural change. Private boards don’t have to copy that, but it’s a useful test for your own brief: someone to write the AI policy is a governance hire, and someone to change how the business works is the Chief AI Officer. If governance is the bigger gap, read our guide to the AI Compliance Officer, a related seat boards often confuse with this one.

Who is hiring a Chief AI Officer?

Outside government, three kinds of business tend to be hiring.

An established digital business adding its first AI seat to the C-suite. AI is already in use across marketing, product and operations, usually without a single owner, and the CEO wants one person accountable for it.

An established business replacing a CTO, Head of Digital or COO, and deciding the replacement should carry an AI mandate from day one. Sometimes the title changes. Sometimes only the brief does.

An overseas company hiring the lead for its Australian division. Head office often has a global AI strategy. The local hire has to make it work here and hold their ground when it doesn’t suit the Australian business.

How do you hire a Chief AI Officer?

  1. Write down what the role has to change in the business in its first year, before anything else.
  2. Decide whether one person carries both governance and the change program, or whether you split them the way federal agencies do.
  3. Brief for the shape of the work. Most people who can do this have done it as a Head of Digital, CTO, COO or Chief of Staff.
  4. Screen for technical grounding, change leadership and commercial judgement together.
  5. Approach candidates directly. The people who can do this job mostly aren’t looking.
  6. At interview, ask what they changed, not what they trialled.

Why you can’t just post the job

A conventional hire starts from precedent. You look at the same role at a competitor, check the standard band, and work out what good looks like on paper. None of that exists yet for a Chief AI Officer, including a reliable salary benchmark. The people who are good at this have mostly built their track record under a different label: Head of Digital, CTO, a Chief of Staff with an AI mandate bolted on, or a COO who quietly ran the AI rollout because nobody else would own it.

That changes how you write the brief. Stop looking for the title in someone’s history and look for the shape of the work. Has this person driven a real change in how a business operates, using AI as the lever? Can they tell you honestly what happened when it didn’t work the first time? A brief that filters on job title filters out most of the people who can do this job.

It also rules out keyword screening. Software set to find “Chief AI Officer” or model names on a CV passes over the COO who rebuilt a claims team around AI and calls it “operations”. We don’t screen candidates with AI or ATS keyword tools for this reason. The people who change a business rarely have the CV a keyword filter is looking for.

What the role actually needs

Boards tend to default to one of two types. A data scientist who’s technically excellent and has never sat through a P&L conversation with the CFO. Or a general executive who’s enthusiastic about AI and can’t tell you why a particular model is the wrong tool for a particular problem. Neither is the hire.

The combination that works is rarer, and harder to spot on a CV. It needs enough technical grounding to separate a real capability from a vendor pitch. It needs the change leadership to get a business through the part where people’s jobs visibly shift, which is where AI initiatives most often stall. And underneath both, it needs the commercial judgement to put all of it in terms the board already speaks: cost, risk, timeline, competitive exposure. Most people are strong in one of these. The hire is credible in all three, even without being expert in each.

At board level, AI fluency sounds like decisions. A fluent candidate can tell you which processes they handed to AI, which they kept with people and why, what it cost, and what went wrong. A less fluent one gives you a tour of platforms and a line about “exploring use cases”.

One test for your own brief: does it read like a technology job, or a leadership job that carries a technology mandate? The first attracts technologists who struggle to land change with the executive team. The second reaches the much smaller pool who can carry it off.

Why this is a headhunted search, not a job ad

Post this role publicly and expect applicants who’ve decided AI is the next thing to put on a CV. The people you want, who are quietly doing this work well somewhere else, aren’t on Seek and haven’t touched their LinkedIn headline in months. Their employers are paying them to stay.

That’s the case for an exclusive, headhunted search over an advertised one. The pool of people who can do this job is small and mostly invisible to a job board. You reach them by approaching them directly. We keep no candidate database, so every search starts from who is doing the work well right now, and we run one client, one role at a time. A typical search runs three to six weeks.

Headhuntly has placed 50+ senior roles over the last five years across marketing, digital, technology and the C-suite, which is where most future Chief AI Officers are working today. Hiring a CMO in the same year? Read our guide to hiring a CMO too, so the two seats don’t own the same budget.

Signals of a strong candidate

Ask for the change, and what broke. “We ran a pilot” tells you nothing. “We changed how the underwriting team works, and here’s what broke in month two” tells you they carried something through to the point where it hurt.

Notice who brings up the limits unprompted. If a candidate tells you what the technology can’t do yet before you ask, they understand the job.

Listen for whether legal, compliance or data governance come up on their own. If they don’t, this person probably hasn’t run anything at the scale your board is picturing.

And ask them to explain the whole thing in board terms: cost, risk, what changes, what timeline. Someone who can only talk technically, or only aspirationally, isn’t ready.

Frequently asked

Does a Chief AI Officer need a technical background? Not necessarily a deep one. The strongest candidates have enough technical grounding to separate a real capability from a vendor pitch, combined with change leadership and commercial judgement.

Do Australian government agencies have to appoint a Chief AI Officer? Yes. Under the AI Plan for the Australian Public Service, agencies were required to appoint one of their existing senior leaders as Chief AI Officer by July 2026 (Department of Finance).

How is a Chief AI Officer different from a CTO? A CTO typically owns the technology function and infrastructure. A Chief AI Officer’s mandate is driving business change through AI specifically, which is as much a leadership and change-management job as a technical one.

Will executive search itself be replaced by AI? AI can screen CVs against keywords. It can’t yet judge whether someone with an unfamiliar background has the judgement to run change through an organisation, which is the actual job of both a Chief AI Officer and the person hiring one.

Where to start

Expect this brief to look nothing like your last executive hire. If you’re a board or CEO working out what this role needs to be before you write the ad, get in touch. Worth a conversation before it’s a job posting. For what a search like this costs, see our executive search fee breakdown.

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