Accountability for AI now sits with senior leadership across creative and media. The leaders who can hold it are few, and the appointment cannot be acquired at the pace boards need.
Across creative and media, boards are placing accountability for AI with a senior leader. The leaders who can genuinely lead on it are rare. Fluency with AI is common at junior level, but the judgement to hold the appointment, to own where the technology ends and human judgement holds, is developed over a career and cannot be acquired at the point it is needed.
Almost every marketing chief now reports a function remade around AI. On BCG’s 2026 figures, 96 per cent claim that change from end to end, while only 8 per cent can operate campaigns where the agents work on their own. The claim is common, and the leader who can genuinely hold accountability for it is not.
The gap does not close with an appointment made at short notice. It closes where a business has developed its own senior leaders, proficient in AI across the years the technology changed. That is the board’s work, developing the leaders who will hold accountability for AI rather than acquiring them when the need arrives. It shows the moment a senior appointment falls due.
The judgement to lead on AI is rarer than the fluency
AI fluency is quick to display, and a capable demonstration takes an afternoon. What a creative or media business cannot readily find is the senior judgement that forms over years, the judgement that holds the commercial risk and owns the line between what the technology does and what stays human.
At junior level a polished AI output is often the visible capability. At senior level the work is judgement, knowing which AI output a client will trust and which campaign is worth the firm’s name. That judgement forms over years of creative work, and AI now does the junior work where careers used to begin.
Senior marketers see it coming. On Gartner’s 2026 survey of senior marketing leaders across North America and Europe, 65 per cent expect AI to reshape their remit within two years, while only 32 per cent think the CMO profile and skill set need to change to match. Gartner expects that by 2027 a lack of AI literacy will be among the top three reasons a marketing chief is replaced.
Deciding who can lead on AI sits with the board, above the function that develops the skill.
The outside cannot supply what a career inside develops
A senior leader with real proficiency in AI is developed over years of doing the work as the technology changed. The day an appointment falls due is too late to begin.
Newsrooms show where the shortfall reaches. In the 2026 Future Newsrooms study from FT Strategies and WAN-IFRA, across 448 newsroom leaders in 86 countries, 61 per cent said a lack of internal AI skill was holding their adoption back, and the same share had developed nothing to close it.
Culture compounds the gap. In the same study 52 per cent named resistance and scepticism inside the newsroom as the biggest barrier to wider AI use. That is the kind of problem a senior leader is brought in to hold, and a junior one cannot.
The scarcity reaches the leaders already in post. On Gartner’s 2026 CMO spend survey, 70 per cent say leading on AI is a priority for the year, while only 30 per cent report the readiness to lead on it at scale. The intent is near-universal at the top, and the readiness is rare.
Acquiring later assumes a field that is already thin. A business that waits reaches the same short supply as every rival at the same moment, and the appointment that follows is slower and less certain than the leader it developed itself.
Employers already develop the capability rather than acquire it
In the 2026 ScreenSkills Powering Production study of more than 500 employers, more than 65 per cent could not find the skills they needed, and the answer they rated most effective was developing those skills inside, at 46 per cent.
The same pattern reaches wider than one sector. In Deloitte’s 2026 State of AI study, more firms chose to develop than to acquire. Workforce education stood at 53 per cent and reskilling at 48 per cent, against 36 per cent recruiting specialists. Developing the capability is already the majority choice.
These figures record a decision taken above the training budget. A business develops senior leaders accountable for AI by deciding early who will lead, funding the years it takes, and holding someone answerable for the result. The training is only the method, and the board’s part is the mandate to develop and the patience to fund it.
The external appointment still has its place. When the field outside is thin, the leader a business developed is the one it can rely on. The senior leader who is genuinely accountable for AI is reached by confidential approach, not advertised. The field is thin whichever way a business turns. Developing inside is what puts a proven internal leader on the slate before the appointment is defined.
The board owns who leads next
The next senior leader is the board’s to develop, and no function below it carries that. Judging which of its own leaders is ready, and who exists outside if none is, sits with the board, drawing on advisors who have worked alongside these leaders for years.
The board that will need a senior leader accountable for AI is the only party looking five years out. Developing that leader starts long before the appointment falls due, not at the point it opens.
Three questions decide whether a board owns it.
- Are we developing the leaders who will hold accountability for AI, or assuming we can acquire them when the appointment falls due?
- Do we know which of our own leaders is ready to hold the line between what the technology does and what stays human?
- If the appointment fell due this quarter, would a proven internal leader be ready, or would we be reaching outside under pressure?
Five years from now, the businesses with leaders accountable for AI will be the ones developing them today.