According to ZoomInfo's latest report, there has been a significant surge in AI leadership titles, which have experienced triple-digit growth over the past two years. The companies and organizations appointing leaders with a specific focus on AI span various industries, highlighting the growing importance of AI technology in organizational strategy, leadership, and decision-making processes.
“The growth of artificial intelligence in the last few years is staggering, and we will continue to see this emerging trend of companies creating more roles in leadership to leverage this technology. At ZoomInfo, we are meeting this demand by placing leaders with AI expertise in management positions to create and oversee our own AI-powered solution, ZoomInfo Copilot. Applying AI to our massive data set has allowed us to create significant value for sales and marketing teams across the globe,” said Brandon Tucker, Chief Data Officer for ZoomInfo.
The data shows that companies across various sectors are making substantial investments in leadership to ensure the successful implementation of AI. While generative AI technologies have sparked the latest wave of interest and investment, many AI-related job titles still focus on foundational disciplines like engineering. This shows that employers are focused on building the core infrastructure needed to create AI products and services that drive sustained growth.
Tripling of AI-related positions
Some key trends from the report show the tripling of AI-related positions across industries in just two years. AI leadership titles have also become three times more prevalent. Specifically, manager-level positions have surged by 174%, directors by 197%, vice presidents by 199%, and chief/C-suite roles by a remarkable 428%.
Generative AI job titles have seen an exponential increase, becoming nearly 250 times more common than two years ago. As of 2024, "Generative AI" job titles represent 3% of all AI-related positions, with a significant spike occurring between the second half of 2023 and the first half of 2024.
Engineering remains the most common term associated with AI-specific job titles, accounting for 43% of such roles, along with technical disciplines like researcher, scientist, specialist, and developer. Popular AI job titles currently include AI Engineer, AI Researcher, and AI Scientist. Leading companies with AI-focused leadership roles include Accenture, Amazon, Boeing, the CIA, Dell, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Southwest Airlines, T-Mobile, and more.
