Who should lead the AI revolution? The case for putting people first.

I've had some version of the same conversation twice in the past week. Two senior executives in large organisations, both grappling with the same question: when it comes to leading your organisation through the AI transformation, who owns it?

Is it the CIO? They control the technology infrastructure, the platforms, the security frameworks, the vendor relationships. They speak the language of systems and integration. You could argue they're the obvious choice.

Or is it the CPO, CHRO, or whoever leads the people function? They own culture, capability, workforce design, and change management. And if AI is fundamentally changing how work gets done and who does it, you could argue the people function has never been more relevant to the strategic agenda.

It's early days, and there's no settled view yet. But the question is becoming urgent. And the way organisations answer it will shape how they come out the other side.

Why this conversation is happening now

PwC research shows that 88% of Australian CEOs now view AI as crucial to their strategic success, and 40% expect generative AI to boost profitability within twelve months. Yet in a survey of over 140 ANZ CIOs, ADAPT found that 70% of organisations still don't expect to be fully AI-ready within the next year. Real investment, real urgency, recognisable gap.

AHRI has written about this directly — both the blind spots most organisations carry in their AI strategy, and why the impact of AI is not a technology problem but a workforce design one. The organisations struggling most are those that haven't determined how work is structured, how decisions are made, and where accountability sits once AI is embedded in everyday work. Those aren't questions a CIO can answer alone.

The case for IT leadership

To be fair to the CIO's corner, there is a legitimate argument to be made.

In CIO.com's 2025 State of the CIO survey of 906 IT leaders, 41% now describe their role as primarily strategic, up from 35% in 2024. The top CEO priority being directed at IT leaders is researching and implementing AI products and projects. In Australia, Westpac brought in former CBA chief data and analytics officer Dr Andrew McMullan as its new Chief Data, Digital and AI Officer — a role specifically designed to integrate data, digital, and AI functions under a single technology leadership mandate.

The argument for IT leadership is essentially that AI is still technology. It requires governance frameworks, security architecture, data infrastructure and platform management. Without those foundations, no amount of people strategy will get you to scale. The CIO owns the engine room, and someone who understands the machinery needs to drive the transformation, right?

That's not quite the whole picture.

The case for people and culture leadership

The most instructive case study right now is Moderna. In late 2024, the biotech company merged its HR and IT departments under a single executive — creating the role of Chief People and Digital Technology Officer, held by their former HR chief Tracey Franklin. Crucially, when the CEO had to choose who should lead the combined function, he chose the people leader, not the technologist. As UNLEASH reported, Franklin described the shift as moving from "workforce planning" (HR's traditional domain) and "technology planning" (IT's) to "work planning": a holistic view of what work needs to be done, and what combination of people and technology provides the optimal way to do it. A fundamentally different lens to those of siloed functions.

Moderna's case is the product of a forward-thinking leadership team, a pre-existing AI culture and the conditions of a company that grew rapidly through COVID and was due for a structure rethink. While most organisations can't simply copy this strategy, the principle is broadly applicable.

Atlassian has just made the same call. This week, the Sydney-founded software company announced that its Chief People Officer, Avani Prabhakar, is expanding her role to Chief People and AI Enablement Officer. Her mandate includes pairing cultural and technology transformation together, embedding AI into workflows, and keeping responsible technology use and skills development at the centre of how Atlassian works.

The expanded role brings together the people function and Atlassian's internal customer engineering organisation, giving the CPO direct leadership of a combined team of HR professionals, engineers and data scientists. This Australian tech company with 12,000 employees, at the frontier of AI adoption, just put its people leader in charge of the transformation.

Research from BCG, MIT, and Gartner consistently reaches the same conclusion: AI value creation depends on reimagining workflows and operating models, not just deploying technology or training people on new tools.

What the Australian public sector is signalling

Under the APS AI Plan 2025, every Commonwealth agency must appoint a Chief AI Officer by July 2026. The guidance explicitly notes the role could sit in a technology function, but equally could be held by a policy or operational leader — deliberately leaving the door open for a non-CIO to lead. The plan describes the CAIO's core responsibility as driving cultural change, building capability, and leading internal engagement. Not managing infrastructure. That is people and culture work.

The questions your organisation needs to answer

My view is that the framing of 'CIO vs CPO' is part of the problem. It assumes the transformation can be owned by one function. In my experience, the organisations that are moving well are those where the CPO and CIO are genuinely co-investing — not competing for turf, not deferring to each other, but working through the hard questions together.

But I'd also argue that if you have to choose who leads, you should lean toward the people function. Technology implementation has a natural home in IT, but change management, workforce design and culture shift do not. When CIOs lead AI transformation without deep HR partnership, the technology gets built, but the organisation does not change. You end up with very efficient processes wrapped around the same old ways of working.

CBA's experience in 2025 is a useful cautionary note. The bank announced it would cut 45 call centre roles, citing AI-powered chatbots reducing call volumes. Months later, it reversed course, admitting the roles were not actually redundant, and that call volumes were in fact increasing. The technology had been deployed before the workforce design was updated.

That is what happens when AI transformation is treated as a technology project rather than an organisational design challenge.

There are some questions worth putting to your own leadership team:

• Who in your organisation currently owns the answer to: 'What work should humans be doing, and what should machines be doing?'
• Is AI investment currently being governed as a technology program, a workforce program, or both? What evidence do you have?
• Are your CPO and CIO in the room together when AI strategy is being discussed? Or do they receive the outcomes separately?
• When AI has caused disruption in your organisation, who led the response? Who should have?

Does your people function have enough technology literacy to lead this? Does your technology function have enough organisational design capability?

Where I think we're headed

I suspect we are going to see more convergence between people and technology leadership over the next five years. Not necessarily structural mergers – Moderna's model is difficult to replicate without the right executive capability and expertise – but certainly cross-functional accountability, and a growing expectation that both the CPO and CIO understand each other's domain.

The emergence of the Chief AI Officer role is itself a signal that neither the CIO nor the CPO has a clean claim on this space. Organisations are creating new roles precisely because the existing ones do not fully cover the ground, and the area is only expected to grow.

I foresee the organisations that treat AI as primarily a technology challenge will under-invest in the capability, culture and change management work that will determine whether transformation sticks. The technology is increasingly accessible and workforces have an appetite to adapt, but the organisational transformation is where the hardest work will lie.

If your CPO is not already at the table when AI strategy is being set, they need to be consulted now, and lead the transformation.

Aaron Neilson | CEO, The Next Group

Aaron leads The Next Group, the parent company of The Next Step (specialist HR and people & culture recruitment) and The Safe Step (specialist HSE/EHS recruitment), operating across Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. He works closely with senior HR, people, and technology leaders across Australia and writes on the future of work, leadership, and organisational strategy.

Sources referenced in this article:

• AHRI — AI impact is not a technology problem, it's a workforce design problem
• AHRI — AI strategy: Three blind spots and how to fix them
• PwC Australia — 5 priorities for Australian CIOs in 2025
• ADAPT — 5 CIO priorities for 2025: IT modernisation, AI and business value
• UNLEASH — Why Moderna merged HR and IT to better 'architect the flow of work'
• CIO.com — State of the CIO 2025: CIOs set the AI agenda
• HCA Magazine — Atlassian's CPO takes on AI enablement officer role
• Department of Finance, Australia — Establishing Chief AI Officers for the APS