The Paradox of Chief Data Officers: Rising Importance, Declining Job Security

The Chief Data Officer Role: What's Next | MIT Sloan Management Review

The rise of generative AI has inspired a wave of transformation ambitions as organizations seek to reimagine everything from customer engagement to operational efficiency. The evidence is compelling: According to the Data & AI Leadership Exchange's 2025 AI & Data Leadership Executive Benchmark Survey, 98.4% of organizations are increasing their investment in data and AI, up dramatically from 82.2% just a year ago. At the core of those AI capabilities lies a fundamental resource: data. Some 20 years after people started saying "data is the new oil," the refrain rings true, with 93.7% of survey respondents indicating that interest in AI is leading to a greater focus on data initiatives. Yet the path forward for data leadership is more nuanced than those trends might suggest. Some 84.3% of organizations have appointed a chief data officer (CDO) or chief data and analytics officer (CDAO), up from just 12% in 2012, according to the survey. But while the CDO numbers continue to grow, these leaders face significant headwinds. Only 47.6% of organizations characterized their CDO role as "very successful and well established"; the majority viewed the role as nascent, evolving, or even failing. The tenure statistics are particularly telling: More than half of CDOs (53.7%) serve less than three years, and 24.1% last for less than two years, according to the Data & AI Leadership Exchange's 2025 survey respondents. Whether these CDOs are being pushed out for ideological reasons, made redundant due to cost pressures, or seeing their mandates and budgets evaporate, the pattern is clear -- on a global scale, data leaders are losing their jobs at an alarming rate. "I have spoken with more data leaders looking for work in the past year than in all my previous years working in this space," one executive recruiter told us. This is happening against a background where hiring for AI skills is rising and the unemployment rate for tech roles overall in the U.S. is hovering at just 2.5%, according to December 2024 Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

The Chief Data Officer Role: What's Next | MIT Sloan Management Review

The rise of generative AI has inspired a wave of transformation ambitions as organizations seek to reimagine everything from customer engagement to operational efficiency. The evidence is compelling: According to the Data & AI Leadership Exchange's 2025 AI & Data Leadership Executive Benchmark Survey, 98.4% of organizations are increasing their investment in data and AI, up dramatically from 82.2% just a year ago. At the core of those AI capabilities lies a fundamental resource: data. Some 20 years after people started saying "data is the new oil," the refrain rings true, with 93.7% of survey respondents indicating that interest in AI is leading to a greater focus on data initiatives. Yet the path forward for data leadership is more nuanced than those trends might suggest. Some 84.3% of organizations have appointed a chief data officer (CDO) or chief data and analytics officer (CDAO), up from just 12% in 2012, according to the survey. But while the CDO numbers continue to grow, these leaders face significant headwinds. Only 47.6% of organizations characterized their CDO role as "very successful and well established"; the majority viewed the role as nascent, evolving, or even failing. The tenure statistics are particularly telling: More than half of CDOs (53.7%) serve less than three years, and 24.1% last for less than two years, according to the Data & AI Leadership Exchange's 2025 survey respondents. Whether these CDOs are being pushed out for ideological reasons, made redundant due to cost pressures, or seeing their mandates and budgets evaporate, the pattern is clear -- on a global scale, data leaders are losing their jobs at an alarming rate. "I have spoken with more data leaders looking for work in the past year than in all my previous years working in this space," one executive recruiter told us. This is happening against a background where hiring for AI skills is rising and the unemployment rate for tech roles overall in the U.S. is hovering at just 2.5%, according to December 2024 Bureau of Labor Statistics data.