AI anxiety, or maybe that should be AInxiety, is on an accelerating upward trajectory. A King's College London study earlier this year (2026) found 69% of people in the UK are worried about what AI will do to jobs, and 22% of employers say they have already cut roles or hiring because of it. Never mind the "greater than 10%" chance that AI will end humanity within the next decade, according to Anthropic researcher, Evan Hubinger. The end of salary is enough of a worry for now.

Leisure time

The soothing words of the richest people on earth do not seem to be calming things. Elon Musk, for one, seems to be repeating something I recall from my own school days: that in the future everyone will work less, and our focus will be on filling the expanse of leisure time that results. What he fails to point out is that, in that idyllic future, nobody seems ready to pay me for my leisure.

Such talk is even older than my school days. In his 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes expected technology and compounding growth to make people four to eight times better off, and thought we would use that wealth to work less, perhaps a fifteen-hour week. He was broadly right about the wealth and wrong about the hours. Most of the gain went into consuming more and doing more, not into leisure.

Musk echoed Keynes in 2024: "If you want to do a job that's kinda like a hobby, you can do a job. But otherwise, AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want." I am not sure relief is what I will feel when one of his robots comes knocking at my door.

We have been here before

So we stand at another inflection point, with those set to gain the most saying everything will be fine, while everyone else looks nervously over their shoulder.

In April 1999, CIO magazine asked whether companies needed a Chief Web Officer. That August, Colgate-Palmolive appointed one, possibly the first in the Fortune 500. This was the height of the dot-com bubble. The Nasdaq peaked in March 2000 and had lost 78% of its value by October 2002. The Chief Web Officer did not survive the hangover. The web did. The work spread into marketing, IT and e-commerce teams, and the title quietly disappeared.

Ten years later it happened again, more slowly. In 2012 Gartner predicted that one in four organisations would have a Chief Digital Officer by 2015, at a time when it was closer to one in twenty. By 2020 PwC put it at around one in five large companies, with growth slowing. This year executive search firm Egon Zehnder described demand for CDOs as having "sharply contracted", with many moving into combined roles or seeing their roles cut.

The pattern is consistent. A new capability arrives, someone is given a title to champion it, and once the capability is part of everyone's job, the title fades.

Value or cost?

This time it feels a little different. New technologies have always cost some people their jobs, but the roles leading the charge have tended to focus on value rather than cost cutting. Rarely has a technology been so closely aligned (or possibly maligned) with job cuts. So should those stepping into a Head of AI role do so with their eyes fixed on cost, or on revenue?

One thing is certain: it is happening quickly. IBM's latest CEO study found 76% of the organisations it surveyed now have a Chief AI Officer, up from 26% a year earlier.

Will it come from Digital?

Who is stepping up? An obvious candidate is the Head of Digital, the role my previous article centred on and the focus for our forthcoming research, ‘Head of Digital 2028’. It makes sense, given the role implies a strong grasp of the latest technology. Will AI be an unlock for the Head of Digital role, or a threat? Are Heads of Digital masters of their own destiny and in control of which it will be. The role is often aligned with Marketing and Sales, with a focus on revenue. Will the Head of AI’s focus be on cost?

You often hear that the mistake people make with AI is to treat it as one thing, when it is many things, each quite different depending on the context. AI is all about context, and over the next few years the battle to deliver value or cut costs with AI will largely be, in my view, a battle for context. I will explain why in my next article.

Will it last?

Will the rapid rise of the Head of AI be matched by an equally vertiginous decline? Is it simply too big a job? The Head of Digital does not oversee everything digital, because almost everything is digital. In the same way, a general Head of AI may cease to exist, because AI will be everywhere and part of everything.

Over the next few months we aim to uncover what the Head of Digital’s world truly looks like today, and how that is likely to change. Our research will evolve into a deeper set of insights from conversations with Heads of Digital, CDOs and the people around them. Everyone who takes part gets the report first, and an invitation to the event in London. If you would like to take part, please let me know: jmy@codehousegroup.com