Three Reasons Your Chief AI Officer May Soon Look More Like Your Head Of HR

Kazuhiro Gomi, NTT Research CEO. Leads research in physics & informatics, cryptography & information security, medical & health informatics.

In the past, CIOs adopted artificial intelligence (AI) in the same ways they approached any technology: Evaluate the platform, secure the data, integrate the systems and deploy the software.​

Agentic AI will drastically change this. ​

CIOs aren’t just deploying a single AI agent; they’re deploying specialized teams of AI agents designed to reason, collaborate and complete fairly complex business practices simultaneously. This is transforming enterprise AI from a technology initiative to an organizational one. ​

These new AI workforces will leave CIOs and chief AI officers (CAIOs) asking questions similar to the ones hiring managers answer. How many AI agents should perform a task? How should responsibilities be divided? Which agents should collaborate? What training should be provided, and how do we determine the agent is ready? When should humans intervene? Who remains accountable when something goes wrong?​

A recent study from my organization, NTT Research Physics of Artificial Intelligence (PAI) Lab, and Harvard University’s Center for Brain Science illustrates why these questions matter. After studying what researchers called a “Society of AI Agents” via a simple Flag Game, they found that adding more AI agents alone didn’t improve task performance. Instead, the performance of multi-agent AI systems depended on the same principles that influence human-based teams, such as organizational structure, communication, diversity and human guidance.​​

As enterprise AI matures, the CIO or the CAIO may take on a role resembling that of chief human resources officers.​​

You’ll build AI teams, not just deploy AI models.​

Today, the AI conversation focuses on how to select the best LLM. Tomorrow, that conversation will be how to build the best AI organization. ​

These results imply team formation matters, even in the AI agent world.​