Why every organisation needs a Chief Cognitive Officer
Most organisations can already see how AI could change their business. In this piece, UN/DO makes the case for a role that barely exists yet: the Chief Cognitive Officer.
Most organisations can see exactly how AI could change their business. They can imagine new workflows, faster decisions, leaner teams. What they’re missing isn’t vision. It’s a mechanism.
“The bigger question is: how do we redesign work so that people, teams, data, and intelligent systems create more value together?” That’s the view from UN/DO, whose team spends its time inside exactly this problem with organisations navigating the shift from AI curiosity to AI capability.
The misconception costing leaders time
Ask executives what’s holding their organisation back on AI, and the answer comes back to adoption, training, tools, and making people comfortable.
“It is not a training problem. It is a work-design and cognitive infrastructure challenge,” says the team at UN/DO. The real questions sit one level up: Which activities should be automated? Which augmented? Which decisions can be accelerated? Where does human judgement matter most, and where is intelligence currently trapped inside the organisation, unused?
Most leaders can answer these in some shape or form. But do they have a repeatable way to move from idea to experiment, from experiment to changed workflow, from changed workflow to scaled capability?
The barrier isn’t imagination – it’s translation. That gap is what UN/DO calls the ‘last mile of AI’, the organisational capability needed to turn rapidly expanding AI possibilities into redesigned work, better decisions and measurable outcomes.
The role that barely exists, and won’t stay that way
Forty-five years ago, most companies didn’t have a technology function. They had a technology person. As computing moved from support role to operating fabric, it created an entire hierarchy. CIOs, CTOs, architects, cyber leads, platform teams.
UN/DO’s team sees the Chief Cognitive Officer as the first vital role to emerge. “AI capability is compounding faster than most enterprise change cycles can absorb,” says the team. “That’s exactly why this role can’t wait for the usual pace of organisational change.”
Right now, AI touches HR, IT, operations, finance, risk and culture, and belongs to none of them. That’s why so many organisations end up with plenty of pilots and enthusiasm, but no coherence.
The Chief Cognitive Officer’s job isn’t to introduce tools. It’s to redesign the relationship between human judgement, machine intelligence, data, process and value creation. Deciding which decisions get accelerated, which tasks get automated or stopped, and how roles and workflows change. “Not as the sole owner of the last mile,” notes the team at UN/DO, “but as the person accountable for making sure the organisation has the mechanisms to close it.”
There’s an economic dimension too. As AI shifts from open experimentation to metered usage such as tokens, credits, agents, someone will need to own that spend. Where intelligence creates value, where it creates hidden cost, and where usage should be encouraged, constrained or scaled.
“The scarce capability in the next phase of AI will not be knowing how to use the technology. It will be knowing how to redesign work around intelligence and knowing where that intelligence actually pays back.”
What good looks like inside AI implementation
The organisations getting this right are easiest to spot by what they’ve stopped doing. They’ve dropped the traditional AI maturity playbook; it was already outdated by the time most companies adopted it. They no longer treat AI as an IT rollout.
“Access to powerful models will soon be universal,” says the team at UN/DO. “The advantage won’t come from having AI. It will come from how fast an organisation can redesign work, experiment, learn and scale around it.”
They’ve understood it changes the operating logic of work itself, and critically, they no longer mistake activity for progress. Steering committees, adoption plans and training modules can create the appearance of movement while the actual work stays untouched.
Instead, these organisations are building the muscle to surface ideas from the work itself, give them form quickly, test them, and scale what proves valuable.
That requires a leadership shift most C-suites weren’t built for. Many executive teams were shaped by industry: deep sector knowledge, operational discipline, running the existing model well. Valuable, but insufficient for what comes next, which demands adaptability, experimentation and a tolerance for making bets before the answer is clear.
“Teams have ambition. They have ideas. They can see how AI might help them work differently. But many have underinvested in the last-mile organisational capability required to turn possibility into predictable outcomes. They don’t need another conversation about AI. They need a vehicle for surfacing ideas, giving them form, testing them quickly, and scaling what works.”
This piece draws on insights from UN/DO.
UN/DO (www.weundo.co) is a strategic futures studio experienced in work redesign, innovation, product and strategy. It helps organisations reinvent for abundant intelligence, closing the last mile of AI to deliver measurable performance and lasting adaptability.
