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Companies are hiring so many tech chiefs they can't decide who's in charge

Boards are stacking C-suites with AI chiefs who can't overrule each other. The resulting gridlock is stalling the projects they were hired to build

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Corporate boards at large companies are adding a chief for every problem AI has created. There's a chief information security officer for security, a chief technology officer for AI infrastructure, a chief data officer for the data feeding it, and sometimes even a chief AI officer stacked on top of all three. There are at least five technology leaders in the C-suite of 71% of organizations, according to Deloitte's 2026 Global Technology Leadership Study. But the setup hasn't created solutions. Forty-one percent of those leaders are already seen by their own CEOs and boards as unable to keep up with how fast AI is reshaping their businesses.

Technology leaders are now expected to run the business, change it, protect it, and grow it at the same time, but none of them are getting a bigger budget or the authority to decide anything without someone else's sign-off. The resulting bottleneck ends up delaying the very AI projects leaders were hired to build.

The CISO, the CTO, and the CDO can't agree fast enough on which legacy systems are worth replacing, or which security........

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