The Chief Data Officer (CDO) role has evolved from a function centered on governance, compliance, and data stewardship into one of the most strategic leadership positions in business.

Today’s CDOs sit at the intersection of technology, business strategy, organizational change, and increasingly, AI.

Despite its growing importance, the role remains difficult to define. In some organizations, the CDO is still viewed as the person responsible for fixing data quality problems. In others, the role has become a catalyst for enterprise transformation. Some CDOs report to the CIO, others to the CEO, COO, Chief Digital Officer, or even the CFO.

This diversity often creates confusion about how to describe the role at all..

In practical terms, the modern CDO job description includes:

1. Being responsible for building trusted data foundations: Ensuring data is accurate, consistent, secure, and accessible so employees can make decisions with confidence. This includes strengthening data architecture, quality, metadata, and stewardship across the organization.
2. Developing enterprise data and AI strategies: Creating a long-term vision for how data and AI will support business objectives and competitive advantage. This means aligning technology investments with organizational priorities and measurable outcomes.
3. Establishing governance and quality standards: Defining the policies, roles, and processes that ensure data is managed responsibly throughout its lifecycle. Strong governance improves trust, reduces risk, and enables regulatory compliance.
4. Enabling AI readiness: Building the trusted data, governance, and operating foundations required for AI initiatives to scale successfully. Without these foundations, even the most advanced AI technologies struggle to deliver value.
5. Partnering with business leaders: Working closely with executives and business teams to understand priorities, solve strategic problems, and identify opportunities where data and AI can create impact. The role requires influencing as much as it requires technical expertise.
6. Driving enterprise-wide adoption: Encouraging employees across the organization to trust, use, and act on data in their everyday work. This often involves leading cultural change, improving data literacy, and embedding data into business processes.
7. Ensuring data investments create measurable business value: Demonstrating that investments in data and AI contribute to tangible business outcomes such as revenue growth, operational efficiency, better customer experiences, or reduced risk. Success is measured not by technology deployed, but by business impact delivered.

The reality is that the role’s title is a misnomer; the modern CDO is no longer defined by data alone. They are defined by value creation. From conversations with leading data executives, one theme continues to emerge: the most effective CDOs are builders, orchestrators, and activators.

Their success depends less on what they directly own and more on how effectively they influence change across the enterprise.

How has the CDO role evolved?

The main way the CDO role has evolved is to move from a data steward to a business transformer, bringing together multiple teams across technology, compliance, privacy, AI and security – while maintaining the buy-in from business stakeholders.

About a decade ago, many organizations viewed the CDO as a guardian of data. The role focused heavily on governance, stewardship, data quality, compliance, and the creation of foundational data capabilities. Those responsibilities remain important today, but they are no longer sufficient.

Modern organizations increasingly rely on data to drive analytics, automation, customer experiences, and AI-powered decision-making. As a result, the CDO’s mandate has expanded far beyond managing information assets.

However, the first responsibility of a modern CDO is still building the foundation. Trusted data remains essential. Organizations continue to need reliable platforms, strong governance frameworks, consistent definitions, and data that can be connected across functions, so this remains a primary function of the role.

However, foundation-building is only one layer. The CDO in 2026 must also bring together technology teams, business stakeholders, compliance leaders, privacy experts, security teams, and AI practitioners. The role increasingly requires orchestrating a complex ecosystem rather than managing a single function.

Most importantly, the modern CDO must activate the organization and get them to understand the impact of their work.

Building platforms and governance structures has little value unless they create measurable business outcomes. The role has shifted from managing data assets to helping organizations use those assets to transform how they operate.

That shift represents perhaps the biggest change in the profession. The CDO is no longer simply responsible for protecting data. The role has now evolved to take responsibility for unlocking its value.

The modern CDO is an orchestrator

A CDO’s job description now encompasses being a systems thinker who understands how various parts of the organization interact and how they must come together to create value.

As organizations adopt AI, the boundaries between traditional responsibilities continue to blur. Consider a customer service chatbot initiative – its success depended on clean, trusted, AI-ready data.

It also required privacy safeguards, responsible AI reviews, security controls, model evaluations, employee training, and workflow redesign.

No single team owns all of these elements. This is where orchestration comes in.

Data may be the center of gravity, but it alone does not create outcomes. Technology, governance, risk management, business processes, and human adoption all play a role. However, many organizations, even today, still operate through functional silos.

Data moves from one department to another, often losing efficiency and context along the way. AI has the potential to connect these fragmented processes and create more seamless workflows across the enterprise. That opportunity places the CDO in a unique position.

Rather than focusing solely on vertical functions, successful CDOs increasingly focus on horizontal workflows that span multiple departments.

The role also requires understanding not only how data flows through systems but also how decisions, processes, and customer experiences flow through the organization.

This systems-level orchestration is becoming one of the defining characteristics of effective data leadership.

CDOs must make influencing part of their job 

One of the most common questions about the CDO role centers on ownership. What should the CDO directly own, and where should influence take precedence?

To me, the answer is surprisingly clear: the CDO should own the foundational elements of the data and AI ecosystem. 

This could include data strategy, AI strategy, governance frameworks, platform capabilities, trusted data assets, responsible AI principles, and the guardrails that support enterprise-wide adoption.

Beyond that, however, influence becomes the primary leadership tool. Modern CDOs operate in highly matrixed environments.

They rarely have direct authority over every process, business unit, or technology team involved in transformation efforts. Instead, they must persuade, align, and mobilize stakeholders across the organization.

In practice, this means the role is far more about change leadership than operational control. The most successful CDOs today understand that their accountability extends beyond managing data assets.

We could say their ultimate accountability is business value creation. Achieving that goal requires helping other leaders become accountable for using data and AI effectively within their own domains.

This is why influence has become such an essential competency. Data initiatives fail when they remain confined to technical teams. 

They succeed when business leaders embrace them as part of their operating model. The CDO’s ability to influence serves as the bridge connecting departments and stakeholders.

Where should the CDO sit in the organization?

There is no simple answer to this question, as few executive roles have reporting structures as varied as the Chief Data Officer. 

Depending on the organization, the CDO may report to the CEO, CIO, COO, CFO, Chief Digital Officer, or even a business leader. Each arrangement brings advantages and tradeoffs.

• Reporting to the CEO often signals strategic importance and elevates data as a board-level priority
• Reporting into technology can strengthen alignment with infrastructure, platforms, and engineering teams 
• Reporting to operational or financial leaders may focus the role more heavily on efficiency and business performance

The question is not which reporting structure is universally correct. Instead, organizations should ask which structure best supports enterprise transformation.

The effectiveness of the CDO depends less on reporting lines and more on the organization’s ability to rally around a shared vision for data and AI. The role requires broad collaboration regardless of where it sits on the organizational chart.

What matters most is clarity around expectations, accountability, and decision rights. Organizations that struggle often create ambiguity around ownership. Business leaders assume the CDO owns all data-related challenges, while the CDO assumes business leaders own the meaning, quality, and usage of their data.

Successful organizations establish clear partnerships. Technology teams create the infrastructure. Data leaders provide governance and enablement. Business leaders own the context, meaning, and outcomes generated from the data.

AI is accelerating the need for that clarity because weak foundations become immediately visible when organizations attempt to scale intelligent systems.

The leadership traits that separate great CDOs

Even though technical expertise remains important, it is no longer the defining characteristic of exceptional data leaders. The strongest CDOs today possess deep commercial acumen. They understand how the business creates value and can connect data initiatives directly to strategic objectives.

This business fluency allows them to serve as translators between technical and non-technical stakeholders. They can move comfortably between discussions about architecture, analytics, operations, customer experience, and business outcomes.

Storytelling has become equally important. Data leaders frequently ask organizations to change established behaviors, adopt new technologies, and rethink familiar processes. Those changes rarely happen because of technical specifications. They happen because people understand the story behind the transformation and see how it connects to their goals.

Effective CDOs know how to communicate the possibilities of data and AI in language that resonates with different audiences.

Curiosity is yet another critical trait. The role demands understanding of interconnected systems, emerging technologies, organizational dynamics, and evolving business models. Leaders who stop learning quickly fall behind.

Perhaps, most importantly, successful CDOs demonstrate resilience. Data transformation is difficult. Progress can be slow, and change frequently encounters resistance.

The ability to persist through complexity, build relationships, and maintain momentum separates high-performing CDOs from those who struggle to create lasting impact.

Emotional intelligence also plays an increasingly important role. As AI automates more routine tasks, human capabilities such as empathy, communication, relationship building, and leadership become even more valuable.

The future CDO will likely spend less time managing technology and more time guiding people through change.

The future of the CDO role

The balance of a CDO’s responsibilities will continue to shift.

Historically, the role focused heavily on building foundational capabilities. As organizations mature, those foundational elements become standardized and embedded into daily operations.

The future will likely place greater emphasis on orchestration and activation. CDOs will spend less time building platforms and more time helping organizations redesign workflows, reimagine operating models, and unlock value from AI-enabled capabilities.

Whether the title itself survives is less important than the mindset it represents. In highly mature organizations, data-driven thinking may become so deeply embedded that a standalone CDO role becomes unnecessary. Data, analytics, and AI could eventually become part of every executive’s responsibility.

Ironically, that may represent the ultimate success of the profession. The goal was never to create a permanent function dedicated to data. It was to make data central to how organizations operate.

Until that happens, however, the modern CDO remains one of the most important leadership roles in business. No longer a data steward alone, today’s CDO is a builder, orchestrator, activator, and translator tasked with helping organizations navigate one of the most significant transformations in modern business history.

About the Author:

Milen Mahadevan is Chief Data and AI Officer at Kroger and President and CEO of 84.51°, Kroger’s data analytics subsidiary. He leads the company’s enterprise data and AI strategy, customer technology teams, and AI platform, working across the business to embed advanced AI capabilities into operations and decision-making.

Mahadevan joined Kroger through its acquisition of dunnhumby USA in 2015 and was appointed President and CEO of 84.51° in 2020 after serving as Chief Operating Officer. Throughout his career, he has led large-scale data, analytics, and AI initiatives that help organizations turn data into measurable business value.