If the first chapter of the AI era was about proving the technology works, then the second was about understanding and managing its risks. The third (emerging) era will be won by leaders who know where AI belongs, where humans matter most, and how to orchestrate both into measurable growth.

Stop Asking “Can We?” You Absolutely Can

Believe it or not, 1972 was the first time two artificial intelligences spoke to one another. ELIZA was an early chatbot designed to mimic a psychotherapist. PARRY was a system designed to simulate paranoid behavior. If you have to ask why, then the answer is, FOR SCIENCE! The researchers weren’t trying to solve a business problem. They simply wanted to see what would happen.

The defining question was straightforward: Can we?

Half a century later, and we face a very different challenge. AI can draft content, support employees, guide customers, analyze data, write code, run a marketing campaign, and increasingly take action on our behalf. The question is no longer “can we?” – we’ve answered that. Its not even “should we?” anymore. Its…

How Do We Ensure AI Creates Value?

You don’t lack AI opportunities. The opposite, in fact. What you lack is a robust framework for identifying which ones can create value. To do that, you need to be able to measure:

  • Trust: Earn it. Don’t assume it. You’ve probably already used AI in recommendation engines, fraud detection, forecasting, and personalization. Customers rarely cared about the technology. They cared whether you made their experience faster, easier, safer, or more relevant. Measure whether customers trust the outcome enough to use it, not whether you put AI in front of them.
  • Impact: Stop counting Ask what AI changes for your customers and your business. Counting copilots deployed, use cases in production, employees using the tools help you track activity, but they don’t prove business success. Measure the difference AI makes, not how busy you’ve been deploying it.
  • Results: Show me the money. More than three-quarters of AI decision-makers report using predictive, generative, or agentic AI. Yet only 37% connect AI’s contribution to profit and loss. If you can show adoption but can’t show the financial contribution, you haven’t proved value. Connect AI to the bottom line.

Enter The Chief Value Orchestrator

AI deployed in silos misses the transformative opportunity to simplify, re-architect, reposition, and embed intelligence into experiences. As Aurelie L’Hostis points out in her latest blog, digital leaders “…need to move from designing around events and channels toward composing capabilities around customer intent.” That’s an value ecosystem mindset, not a process efficiency one.

The role of the Chief Digital Officer is changing. The days of leading digital transformations, and even owning AI deployment are over. Those are, and always should have been, an enterprise technology problem. Your CIO’s problem. Many CDOs only existed because their CIO hadn’t stepped up to the plate. Well, believe me, most have now.

Tomorrow’s CDO will orchestrate value creation across an increasingly complex AI ecosystem. They will connect customer experience, technology, data, trust, governance, and commercial outcomes into a unified growth agenda. That means:

  • prioritize high-value use cases that improve customer and business outcomes simultaneously.
  • Partner across the executive team to align technology, marketing, data, security, and finance priorities.
  • Establish trust and governance mechanisms as AI becomes more autonomous.
  • Measure value creation relentlessly through growth, retention, efficiency, and customer outcome metrics.
  • Focus management attention on fewer, higher-impact initiatives rather than expanding the portfolio indefinitely.

Move From AI Adoption To AI Impact To AI Results

The organizations The approach is simple to articulate, but hard to execute. Think quality and impact, not quantity. The goal is not to identify every possible AI use case. That’s easy. It is to identify the customer moments, business processes, and growth opportunities where AI creates meaningful advantage.

Read our AI CDO report to learn more.

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