Only 11 of the Fortune 500 list a Chief AI Officer. 125 list a head or VP of AI

We took the 2026 Fortune 500 list with company domains and joined it on the domain to a people set derived from LinkedIn profiles. 483 of the 500 companies have at least one person row in that set, and those 483 hold 8,554,225 rows between them, a median of 10,123 rows per company. Two regexes did the matching, one for Chief AI Officer and one for head, VP, SVP or EVP of AI, and both are printed verbatim in the Method section below. They returned 582 rows. We read every one of the 582 by hand, title and headline together, and dropped 83 of them with a reason recorded per row.

Two limits apply to every number below. Every title is self-reported by the person, not taken from a filing, a proxy statement or a company org chart. And the join is a snapshot of September 2026 with no date on any row, so a departed executive can still be present and a recent hire absent. When we write that a company lists no one with a title, we mean no person in the data holds it. We do not mean the company lacks such an executive, and one of the eleven below shows exactly that gap.

We expected a few hundred companies. The figure quoted everywhere puts Chief AI Officer adoption at 43% of the Fortune 500, which would be something like 208 of the 483 we can see. We found 11 of 483 with any Chief AI Officer match, 2.3%, 10 of 483 where it is the person's own title, 2.1%, and 7 of 483 where that title names no unit, region or product, 1.4%. The second surprise sits a rung lower. 125 of 483 companies list at least one head, VP, SVP or EVP of AI, 456 people in total, so a quarter of the list does have someone running AI, usually one level below a chief title.

Read 11 as a floor. A person missing from the source lowers the count we can produce, and so does a row that is out of date. Our inspection only removed rows. The true count is more likely above ours than below it.

Key findings

1. 11 of the 483 Fortune 500 companies with people in the data list a person carrying a Chief AI Officer title, 2.3%. Source: ProfessionLens, September 2026.
2. 10 of 483 list a person whose own title is Chief AI Officer, 2.1%, and 7 of 483 list one whose title names no unit, region, product or segment, 1.4%. All three tiers are published because they differ only in which rows count.
3. 125 of 483 list at least one head, VP, SVP or EVP of AI, 25.9%, and 456 people hold those titles after inspection.
4. 125 companies with a head-of-AI title against 11 companies with a Chief AI Officer title is 11.4 times as many companies.
5. JPMorgan Chase lists 43 people with a head-of-AI title, Nvidia 29, Microsoft 21, Oracle 21 and Amazon 18. Those five hold 132 of the 456 people, 28.9%.
6. Amazon, with 123,808 person rows, lists no one with the exact Chief AI Officer title. It does head the combined-title table further down, with "Chief Ai & Technology Officer". Walmart (49,672 rows), Apple (84,467), JPMorgan Chase (55,300) and Bank of America (81,600) list no Chief AI Officer either.
7. 18 of 483 list a combined chief title that carries AI alongside another remit, 3.7%. Those 18 and the 11 share no company, so the widest figure we can defend is 29 of 483, 6.0%, against the 43% in circulation.
8. 83 of the 582 raw matches were dropped after inspection. The largest group is 22 rows where a bare unqualified AI leadership title appeared on more than one person at the same company.
9. Five of the eleven Chief AI Officer companies were checked against a public source and confirmed. Fastenal's could not be: its leadership page returns 404 and a web search finds nothing.

11 of 483 companies carry a Chief AI Officer match, 10 a person's own title, 7 a title naming no unit

The three counts differ only in which rows we let in, so we publish all three with the reason each company sits where it does. 11 of 483 is every company with any match, assistant rows included. 10 of 483 drops the company whose only evidence is an assistant. 7 of 483 keeps only companies where a person's own title carries the AI remit and names no unit, region, product or segment.

Tier 1, own title, no unit named. Seven companies, eight rows, because Entergy contributes two.

Entergy is the clearest case of the missing date. Andy Quick was reported as Entergy's first Chief AI Officer. Dawn R. carries "VP, Chief AI Officer" at the same company. With no date on either row we cannot order the two. Fastenal is the weakest of the eleven: the person's headline repeats the title, but the Fastenal leadership page returns 404 and no press or company source names a Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer. The person is recorded in Ukraine. We kept the row because the rule is the same for every row, and we state the failed check wherever Fastenal appears.

Tier 2, own title but divisional. Three companies, five rows.

Microsoft has three Chief AI Officer rows and every one of them sits in a unit. Two name the unit in the title, Microsoft Federal Civilian and Tech for Social Impact International. The third reads as a bare title, and the headline places it in Microsoft NSG. We first had Microsoft in the enterprise tier and the enterprise count at 8; reading the third row moved it, and the enterprise tier is 7. Intel's row names Wireless and Connectivity, Lam Research's names Semiverse Solutions.

Tier 3, assistant only. One company.

U.S. Bancorp shows what this source can miss. The bank does have a Chief AI Officer, Prashant Mehrotra, confirmed on CXOTalk, and no row for him appears in 47,729 person rows. The one U.S. Bancorp row that did carry the title, Vinke Xu, is a different person whose own headline names data scientist and senior quantitative analyst, so we dropped it. The only U.S. Bancorp row left is an assistant. Entergy has an assistant row too, Karena Young, on top of its two holders.

Amazon holds 123,808 person rows and lists no one with a Chief AI Officer title

These are the largest companies by Fortune rank with no Chief AI Officer match, each with the person rows the data holds for it, so a reader can judge the coverage behind the absence. Alphabet and Berkshire Hathaway are not in this table. They hold 488 and 16 rows, too few to read anything into.

The table counts the Chief AI Officer title only. Amazon does list one combined chief title carrying AI, which is in the table further down. JPMorgan Chase and Nvidia are the interesting rows. Both are at the top of the head-of-AI leaderboard, 43 people and 29 people, and neither lists a person with a Chief AI Officer title. Six of the eighteen companies here list no head of AI either, including CVS Health with 49,014 rows and ExxonMobil Holdings with 49,717.

125 of 483 companies list a head or vice-president of AI, 456 people in all

The published head-of-AI figure is 456 people at 125 companies, 25.9% of the 483 covered. That regex counts head, VP, SVP and EVP titles with AI in the remit, including the comma form, so "Vice President, AI Strategy" counts alongside "VP of AI Strategy". Two narrower variants matter enough to print, because the number moves with the choice:

All three people counts exclude assistant, chief-of-staff, deputy and office-of rows, which say the role exists at a company without the person holding it. We recounted the reviewed file without that exclusion for this report: it gives 460 people at 126 companies on the published regex, 315 at 107 with the comma form excluded, and 229 at 98 on the "head" variant.

Excluding the comma form is a punctuation artefact and not a difference in role, which is why we publish 456 at 125. The "head" variant is the most conservative of the three and the least exposed to bank grade inflation, since at several banks vice president is a grade rather than a job.

Top 20 companies by head-of-AI holders, on the published regex, after inspection:

The top five hold 132 of the 456 people, 28.9%. On the "head" variant the order changes: Amazon 17 people, Microsoft 13, Citigroup 12, JPMorgan Chase 10, Nvidia 8, Wells Fargo 8, Oracle 6, Intel 5, IBM 5, Kyndryl Holdings 5, ServiceNow 5, ADP fewer than 5. The inspection did not change who leads on the published regex. We counted the raw matches in data/reports/caio_matches_raw.csv for this report: before any inspection JPMorgan Chase already led with 55 rows and Nvidia had 36. After the inspection JPMorgan Chase has 43 and Nvidia 29. Anyone quoting this leaderboard should name the regex next to it.

83 of the 582 raw matches were dropped, 22 of them for a title held by several people at once

Every drop has a recorded reason, grouped here:

The 17 and the 15 are a recount of the reason text in data/reports/caio_matches_reviewed.csv; an earlier draft printed 16 and 16.

Only one person can hold an unqualified company-wide AI title, so where a company showed several identical bare titles we dropped the whole cluster rather than picking one row arbitrarily. A company showing exactly one such title keeps it.

The junk group is worth a look. An Intel row titled "Head of AI Chip Technology" is headed "Fashion Designer, Artist, and Fitness Trainer". An Amazon row is headed "Food and Industrial Microbiologist". An Oracle "Vice President AI Systems & Cloud Infrastructure" is headed "Student at debre berhan university". A Microsoft "Head of Artificial Intelligence" is headed "AI AND ML LEARNING LEARNER, BCA STUDENT".

18 companies list a combined chief title carrying AI, which takes the widest figure to 29 of 483

Some companies put AI into a chief title alongside another remit, most often data. We counted those separately and never folded them into the Chief AI Officer number. 18 holders at 18 companies, 3.7% of 483, one holder each. The titles are printed as the rows carry them, including the capitalisation of the source and the misspelling in the IBM row:

Amazon's row is tiered divisional because the headline places the role in AWS. The same 18 rows are published as combined_titles.csv in the dataset.

A further 6 rows were assistants, deputies or office-of staff attached to such an officer, at Danaher, Hartford Insurance Group, Lincoln National, Lumen Technologies, Mastercard and ServiceNow. No company appears in both the combined-title list and the Chief AI Officer list, so 11 companies plus 18 companies is 29 of 483, 6.0%. That is the widest figure we can defend for a chief title carrying AI anywhere in it.

125 head-of-AI companies against 11 Chief AI Officer companies is 11.4 times as many

Same unit on both sides: companies with at least one holder. 125 against 11 is a factor of 11.4. The people count is a separate measure. 456 people hold a head-of-AI title across those 125 companies. The two companies with the most head-of-AI people, JPMorgan Chase with 43 and Nvidia with 29, are both among the companies that list nobody with a Chief AI Officer title.

The 43% in circulation measures a wider universe than the 6.0% of 483 we can reproduce

The number people quote comes from https://resources.rework.com/news/ai-jobs-skills/chief-ai-officer-adoption-fortune-500, which says adoption jumped "from 19% to 43% of companies in twelve months" and that "LinkedIn tracked 94 CAIO appointments among Fortune 500 companies in 2025 alone, compared to 30 in 2024 and fewer than 10 in 2023". The page attributes this to LinkedIn with no link, no dataset and no method, and its own definition carries a hedge: it counts a Chief AI Officer "or an equivalent titled executive". That is a wider universe than the title. Even so, our widest comparable figure, every company with a chief title carrying AI, is 6.0% of 483 against the 43% claimed, which is seven times apart.

Two other figures get cited in the same conversation and measure different things again. Russell Reynolds (https://www.russellreynolds.com/en/insights/articles/architects-of-change-technology-leadership-in-the-fortune-500) looks at technology officers at 2024 Fortune 500 companies, N = 498, counting CIO, CTO and CDO titles. It does not isolate a chief AI role; its finding is that the share of top Fortune 500 technology leaders carrying the CIO title fell from 68% five years earlier to 49% in 2024. IBM (https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/en-us/c-suite-study/ceo) reports that 76% of CEOs say they have a Chief AI Officer in 2026, up from 26% in 2025. That universe is CEOs surveyed worldwide at organizations of every size, and it measures what CEOs say rather than what titles exist.

Five of the eleven were checked against a public source and one failed

A sixth check, Fastenal, failed. The leadership page returns 404 and no press or company source names a Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer there.

582 raw matches became 499 kept rows

The 17 companies with no person row at all are Meta Platforms, Comcast, Procter & Gamble, Lithia Motors, PG&E, Edison International, Dick's Sporting Goods, Consolidated Edison, Venture Global, Expand Energy, Yum China Holdings, Equitable Holdings, Burlington Stores, Gold.com, Ameren, Monster Beverage and APi Group.

Method

The company list is the 2026 Fortune 500 with domains, 500 rows, from installmap.com/data/universes/fortune500/companies.csv. The person source is the collection blitz_people in the Mongo database data, 137,403,249 rows, indexed on company_domain. The join is exact on the domain string. Domains were queried in batches of 50 with the title regex applied server side, and a second aggregation per batch counted person rows per domain, which gives coverage and depth.

The regexes, case insensitive, matched against the title field.

Chief AI Officer:

chief\s+(artificial\s+intelligence|ai)\s+officer

Head or vice-president of AI:

(head|vp|vice\s+president|svp|evp|senior\s+vice\s+president|
 executive\s+vice\s+president)[\s,]+(of\s+)?(ai|artificial\s+intelligence)\b

Combined chief titles carrying AI:

chief\s+[a-z&,\s]*\b(ai|artificial\s+intelligence)\b[a-z&,\s]*\s+officer

Inspection rules, applied in order, first match wins: an assistant, chief of staff, deputy or office-of title is indirect; a duplicate row is dropped; a leading rank of assistant, associate or second vice president is too junior; a bare unqualified title held by more than one person at one company drops the whole cluster; an individual-contributor role at a vice-president grade is dropped; a headline that contradicts the title or a junk profile is dropped. Anything left is a holder, tiered enterprise or divisional on whether the title names a unit, region, product, function or client segment. 41 Chief AI Officer and combined-title rows and 16 head-of-AI rows were decided individually against a table in the script that overrides every rule.

People counts, both for Chief AI Officer and for head of AI, count holders only. Assistant, chief of staff, deputy and office-of rows raise a company's caio_any flag but are never counted as people. Counting every kept row instead gives 460 head-of-AI people at 126 companies, which is the number a reader recomputing from the reviewed file without that rule will get.

Coverage and depth: 483 of 500 companies have rows; median 10,123 rows per company, p10 812, p90 48,265, mean 17,710. The percentiles are taken as the value at the sorted index at or below the percentile, not by interpolating between two neighbouring companies. Every share here divides by 483, never 500. Counts below 5 print as <5, except in the named rosters above.

Limitations, all of which we would raise against our own numbers. Titles are self-reported and LinkedIn-derived. No row carries a date, so there is no as-of field and no time series, and Entergy's two enterprise rows cannot be ordered. Depth runs from 1 row to 123,808. PulteGroup holds the single row and Amazon the 123,808, and Alphabet at 488 rows and Berkshire Hathaway at 16 are coverage artefacts we never use as examples of a company without the title. Assistant and divisional matches were separated rather than silently counted, which is why 11 and 10 and 7 are published together. Fastenal's match could not be confirmed against any public source. A company with no matched row may still have the executive: U.S. Bancorp does have a Chief AI Officer and the data holds only an assistant row. And 11 is a floor, because a person missing from the source lowers our count and cannot raise it.

Data

• fortune500_ai_titles.csv, one row per Fortune 500 company, all 500, including the 17 with no person rows, with person rows and the title flags
• caio_companies.csv, the companies with a Chief AI Officer match, with the matched title, the tier and the inspection reason
• head_of_ai_top.csv, the thirty companies with the most head-of-AI holders after inspection
• combined_titles.csv, the 18 combined chief titles carrying AI, with the title as the row carries it
• README.md, every column and denominator
• METHOD.md, the join, the regexes, the inspection rules and the limits

Data: CC BY 4.0. Next to any number here, cite: Source: ProfessionLens, September 2026.