Why Your Company Needs a Chief Data, Analytics, and AI Officer

by Vipin Gopal, Thomas H. Davenport and Randy Bean

December 1, 2025

Illustration by Miguel Porlan

Summary.

How is AI and data leadership at large organizations being transformed by the accelerating pace of AI adoption? Do these leaders’ mandates need to change? And should overseeing AI and data be viewed as a business or a technology role?

Vipin Gopal is a longtime senior industry executive, and data and AI leader. He has served as Chief Data and Analytics Officer for Eli Lilly and Company and Walgreens Boots Alliance, and as Senior Vice President of Analytics at Humana. Early in his career, he held data and analytics leadership roles with CIGNA and United Technologies. Gopal holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University.

Thomas H. Davenport is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and faculty director of the Metropoulos Institute for Technology and Entrepreneurship at Babson College, a visiting scholar at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and a senior adviser to Deloitte’s Chief Data and Analytics Officer Program.

Randy Bean is a senior advisor, board member, keynote speaker and moderator, contributing author, and ex founder and CEO. He has been a participant, observer, chronicler, and leader in the field of data and AI for more than four decades. He is the author of Fail Fast, Learn Faster: Lessons in Data-Driven Leadership in an Age of Disruption, Big Data, and AI.

Read more on AI and machine learning or related topics Technology and analytics, Leadership, Corporate governance, Digital transformation, Data management, Analytics and data science and Generative AI

Why Your Company Needs a Chief Data, Analytics, and AI Officer

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