IBM's Institute for Business Value conducts an annual global CEO study, and its 2026 edition - drawn from 2,000 CEOs and equivalent leaders across 33 countries, in partnership with Oxford Economics - focuses on how AI is reshaping the structure of the C-suite itself. It finds that 76 percent of surveyed organizations now have a Chief AI Officer, up from just 26 percent a year earlier, and that talent and technology leadership roles are increasingly converging into a single function.
The study also quantifies AI's growing role in decision-making directly: CEOs reported that AI already influences roughly a quarter of operational decisions in early 2026, a share they expect to nearly double to 48 percent by 2030. Organizations that redesigned five core functions around AI - technology, finance, HR, operations, and cross-functional collaboration - were four times more likely to report achieving their business objectives.