The scarcest leaders next year will be the ones who can put AI into production and keep it secure. Here are the ten roles where that shortage will hurt most.
One week apart last May, Anthropic and OpenAI each announced a business that places engineers inside customer companies. To me, that settles which executive jobs will be hottest in 2027. They'll go to the people who can get AI running inside a real company and keep it from breaking things once it's there.
Neither was a side project. OpenAI's Deployment Company started with more than $4 billion and agreed to buy the consulting firm Tomoro, which brings roughly 150 forward deployed engineers and deployment specialists. Anthropic’s venture, formed with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman and Goldman Sachs, opened in July as Ode, backed by about $1.5 billion in committed capital, according to the Financial Times. When two of the biggest AI labs back deployment businesses at that scale, they’re telling you where they see the bottleneck.
I'd group the ten roles below around four problems companies will face as AI moves from pilots into daily operations. Two of them are specialist roles, and each earns its place because it creates a leadership search above it.
Getting AI Past the Demo
Every role in this group exists because a working demo and a working system are separated by months of engineering inside a real business.
1. Head of Forward Deployed Engineering
Forward deployed engineers write production code inside a customer's environment, and running a team of them has become a title of its own. Job boards show how senior it's gotten. Snorkel AI's posting for a VP, Head of Forward Deployed Engineering asks for 10-plus years in software or ML engineering, including five years leading multiple teams. The company plans to scale its FDE organization from 40 to more than 100 engineers.
The bench behind it is shallow. Christian & Timbers' Elite FDE Scarcity Study mapped more than 17,000 FDEs in the United States and estimates only about 2,000 have repeatedly taken enterprise AI into production with a measurable result. Nearly 80% of that group came up through Palantir. Fewer still have led a team. I expect this to be the most contested VP-level search of 2027, and companies stuck debating whether to call it VP of Forward Deployed Engineering or VP of Deployment will lose finalists while they decide.
2. Chief Deployment Officer
The Chief Deployment Officer is an emerging umbrella title for the executive who owns AI deployment, FDE teams, agentic workflow automation, and measurable ROI.
Umbrella is the right word. In most companies, those pieces are split between a technology leader and an operations leader. Finished systems sit in the gap between them for months while a data owner withholds access or a business unit postpones the change. Somebody needs the authority to end the wait.
The numbers make the case. The same study found fewer than one in five companies report meaningful AI ROI. A Chief Deployment Officer puts that work under one executive who answers for the result.
The strongest case against these two roles comes from the same labs. If a mid-size company can rent a forward deployed team from Ode or OpenAI's Deployment Company, it may never hire a Head of Forward Deployed Engineering or a Chief Deployment Officer of its own. I'd give that a year or two at most. A company renting the work still needs someone inside who can tell whether it's working.
3. AI Engineers
AI engineer ranked first on LinkedIn's 2026 Jobs on the Rise list for the U.S. It's an individual contributor title, so why is it here? A company with 30 AI engineers needs a Head of AI Engineering or VP of AI above them who can hold inference cost down and decide what's ready to ship. Far fewer people have led AI engineers through a full release cycle than have worked as one.
When the Agents Have the Keys
Once AI agents act on company systems with their own credentials, security can no longer wait for a review at the end of a project.
4. AI Security and Cybersecurity Specialists
Ask security people what they’re short on and most will say AI. In ISC2’s 2025 workforce study of more than 16,000 professionals, 41% named it as a missing skill, ahead of cloud security at 36%. Companies aren’t waiting for the market to catch up. In Splunk’s CISO Report 2026, 78% of the 650 CISOs surveyed had already set up teams just to secure AI agents.
Those teams need people fluent in both application security and adversarial machine learning. Anthropic's Red Team Engineer posting, for example, asks for experience in penetration testing and in jailbreaking AI models. Leadership titles in this area (VP of AI Security, Head of AI Red Teaming) are so new that boards should screen for security leaders who've tested AI in production, whatever their current title says.
5. AI-Native CISO
The CISO's mandate is growing faster than the budget behind it. In Proofpoint's 2026 Voice of the CISO report, 78% said they expect to manage AI risk over the next two years without a matching increase in resources. Splunk's survey adds two more numbers: over three-quarters worry about personal liability for incidents, and just 6% have fully deployed agentic AI in their own security operations.
Christian & Timbers tracked companies that replaced a CISO or chief security officer and saw how quickly the bar rose. From January to July 2025, 9 of 22 named deep agentic AI expertise as the most critical qualification for the new hire. Over the same stretch this year, all 32 did.
When an agent does something nobody approved, the CISO is the one explaining it to the board. The candidates I'd put on a shortlist have secured agents acting on live systems and use AI in their own security operations to keep up with attackers who already do. Deputy CISOs and VPs of Security Engineering with that record are worth promoting early.
Redrawing the Org Chart
These three roles decide how the organization itself changes, and each one is being redefined as companies hire for it.
6. Chief Transformation Officer
WPP appointed Anne-Isabelle Choueiri as Chief Transformation Officer this year to lead the operational transformation underpinning Elevate28, the three-year growth plan it unveiled in February. Tata Communications hired Narottam Sharma, until then CIO at Jubilant FoodWorks, on the strength of his work redesigning operating models around AI.
CIOs have argued for years that changing how thousands of people work is a separate job from running technology. AI has made the argument hard to ignore. Where a company has both, the Chief Deployment Officer answers for whether the AI systems work, and the transformation chief answers for whether the business changes around them. The danger is a transformation office that turns into project management with a C-suite title. Strong candidates for Chief Transformation Officer or VP of AI Transformation can name a P&L line their work moved.
7. Chief Product and Technology Officer
Netflix promoted Elizabeth Stone from CTO to a newly created CPTO role after its chief product officer left, and the Financial Times gave Rebecca Salsbury the same title in January. Freshworks and Stitch Fix followed later in the year.
If AI lets a team prototype a feature in an afternoon, every disagreement between separate product and engineering chiefs costs weeks. One accountable executive removes that cost. The model has limits, though, and Model N went the other way in January by splitting product and technology so each leader could focus as its platform scaled. A company with a large legacy platform to keep stable may well need two leaders. Where the CPTO does fit, searches usually draw on VPs of Product or Engineering who've already run the other side informally.
8. Chief AI Officer
IBM's 2026 CEO Study found 76% of organizations now have a CAIO, up from 26% a year earlier, which is why the role sits late on this list. After adoption that fast, the next wave of searches will likely come from companies rethinking what the role should deliver. The same study found only 10% of CEOs said advanced or agentic AI was primarily driving their growth, so boards that hired a strategist the first time around will screen the next CAIO, and the VPs of AI below that role, for production records. Where a Chief Deployment Officer also exists, the CAIO can concentrate on AI strategy and governance and leave production results to the deployment chief.
The Budget and the Boardroom
The last two roles decide what AI costs and who keeps watch over it.
9. VP of AI Infrastructure
Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta plan roughly $725 billion in 2026 capital spending, according to the Financial Times’ tally following first-quarter earnings, up 77% on 2025. Evercore and Bank of America model the total above $1 trillion next year.
You can see it in who's changing jobs. In April, Anthropic hired Eric Boyd away from Microsoft, where he ran the Azure AI Platform, to become its Head of Infrastructure as it starts on $50 billion of data centers. Google went to Nvidia for Matthew Hull. Most companies will never build a data center. Those running AI in volume still face cloud and inference bills that keep climbing, though, and somebody has to decide where the workloads run and whether the spending pays off. Right now that usually lands on a CTO with plenty else to do.
10. Board Directors With AI Fluency
Boards worry about AI far more than they understand it. In 2023, 12% of S&P 500 companies listed AI as a risk in their filings, according to The Conference Board. By 2025, it was 83%. Directors with disclosed AI expertise went from 1.5% to 2.7% between 2021 and 2025. Only about one in five executives surveyed said their company planned to add a director with dedicated AI or technology expertise.
Christian & Timbers counted for itself, and the picture is worse. By its count, no large public company outside the tech sector has more than one director who has worked hands-on with AI. One person can't check every claim management brings into the room.
The numbers depend on who's counting. Morgan Stanley's review of ISS data tags almost 700 S&P 500 directors, about a fifth of the total, as having AI skills. The two studies use different definitions of AI expertise, which helps explain the gap. For a board search, I'd want to know which candidates have overseen an AI deployment and challenged management on the results.
The Question Behind All Ten Roles
In 2027, I'd open every one of these searches with the same question: what has this person been accountable for? An engineering leader should be able to point to a system that went live and a number that changed because of it. Board candidates usually can't. That's fine.
I want to hear about a decision they shaped. A résumé full of AI titles tells me very little.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Are the Hottest Executive Roles of 2027?
The ten roles in this forecast are Head of Forward Deployed Engineering, Chief Deployment Officer, AI engineers, AI security specialists, AI-native CISO, Chief Transformation Officer, CPTO, CAIO, VP of AI Infrastructure and AI-fluent board directors. The hardest searches will be for leaders who have already put AI into production, since so few have done it.
What Does a Chief Deployment Officer Do?
In most companies, getting a finished AI system into daily use falls between the technology team and the operations team, so it sits and waits. A Chief Deployment Officer is the person with enough authority over both to get it moving and is held responsible if it doesn't pay off.
What Is a Head of Forward Deployed Engineering?
It's the executive in charge of forward deployed engineers, the people who go into a customer's business and build AI systems there. Snorkel AI's opening for the job asks for more than 10 years of engineering, five of them managing multiple teams.
Why Are Experienced AI Deployment Leaders So Hard to Find?
Christian & Timbers' Scarcity Study counted more than 17,000 forward deployed engineers in the U.S. but only about 2,000 who have taken AI into production more than once with results to show for it. Even fewer of those have run a team.
How Is the CISO Role Changing Because of AI?
Companies now let AI agents into their systems with credentials of their own, and when one misbehaves the CISO has to explain it. When Christian & Timbers looked at companies that replaced a CISO or chief security officer between January and July 2026, all 32 had made deep agentic AI expertise the top requirement.
Do Boards Need Directors With AI Expertise?
Yes. By 2025, 83% of S&P 500 companies listed AI as a risk, but only 2.7% of their directors had disclosed AI expertise. A board that can't question management about AI has no real way to oversee it.