Barclays has named Anita Tanna as its first chief AI officer(opens in a new tab). She is not an engineer or a data scientist. She spent almost 12 years in equity sales at Citi, joined Barclays in 2021, and spent nearly three years as its group chief of staff. Her brief is to speed up AI adoption across the group, find where it creates the most value, and oversee responsible use. The appointment follows third quarter results that came with plans to cut about 5,000 jobs this year as the bank leans on AI. HSBC named its first chief AI officer in March, and Citigroup promoted a group head of AI in May.
The choice says what Barclays thinks the hard part is. Picking models and building platforms already has an owner in the technology function. What has no owner is the work itself: which processes change, which roles shrink, who signs off on the savings. A chief of staff is the person in a bank who knows where decisions stall and how to move a change across business lines. That is an operating job, not a technical one.
The survey data points the same way. In a Gartner survey of 2,002 CIOs and technology executives(opens in a new tab), only 13% report significant or transformational value from AI, and 58% say their companies are pushing them to show cost savings from earlier AI spending. Just 4% plan to redesign roles for a mix of people and AI agents. The ones that do are 2.4 times more likely to be top AI performers.
The ROAI question is who owns the return. If your AI leader controls the tools but not the workflow, the savings in the business case depend on business heads who were never measured on them. That is how a portfolio of pilots stays a portfolio of pilots.
For the CEO and the CAIO this week. Write down who has authority to change a process, a role design and a headcount plan when an AI deployment calls for it. If that person is not your AI leader, either give them the mandate or make the business owner sign the savings target. Then check how many of your live deployments have a named owner for the outcome, not just for the system.
Action items
Barclays named its group chief of staff, not a technologist, as its first chief AI officer, with a brief to speed adoption and find value. Gartner's CIO survey backs the logic: the few companies redesigning roles around AI agents are far more likely to be top AI performers.
For the CAIO
Make sure whoever owns AI also has the authority to change processes, roles and headcount plans, or make business owners sign the savings.
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