If you run a 50-person manufacturing company, the AI question probably isn't "who should be our Chief AI Officer?"
It's: "where is our team wasting skilled time, and can AI safely reduce it?"
Big companies are hiring AI executives fast
An IBM Institute for Business Value study conducted with Oxford Economics — 2,000 CEOs across 33 countries, surveyed this spring — found that the share of organizations with a Chief AI Officer jumped from 26% to 76% in a single year. Nearly a tripling, in twelve months.
Michael Domanic, Head of AI at the business-education firm Section, made a sharp observation about that wave in a recent essay: most companies are hiring the wrong person for it. Job descriptions screen for PhDs and years of IT leadership, when the actual job — in his words — is business fluency, systems thinking, change management, and creativity. He compares it to the Chief Digital Officer wave of the 2010s: rapid adoption, unclear mandates, and a market full of expensive evangelists quietly reassigned within two years.
His most useful point, though, is where he says to look instead: the right AI leader is often already inside the company — the person who's already transforming their coworkers' work without being asked.
What that means at 10–200 employees
Everything above gets more true as the company gets smaller. Even if you could justify a senior AI hire, most small manufacturers don't yet have enough proven AI work to keep that person focused on high-value problems. And that employee who's already quietly automating their corner of the shop? In a smaller company, you almost certainly know exactly who they are.
The missing piece is usually not a title. It's three things:
- One workflow worth testing — chosen deliberately, not by whoever demos software at you first
- A controlled test, with a measured before-and-after and clear data boundaries
- A person inside your company who owns it when the test is done
A manufacturer may not be ready for AI if…
- The workflow isn't documented at all
- Nobody agrees who owns the process
- The data is too sensitive to test safely right now
- Leadership wants a magic fix but won't involve the people doing the work
- The real problem is ERP cleanup, staffing, or process discipline — not AI
If two or more of those sound familiar, fixing them is worth more than any AI tool — and an honest advisor should tell you that before selling you anything.
The smaller, smarter first step
What most shops need first is someone from outside the company who can help choose the first workflow, keep the test controlled, involve the people doing the work — and then hand it back to your team and get out of the way.
That's what our 30-Day Workflow Pilot is: one workflow, a measured baseline, a supervised test with your people, and a written scale-or-stop answer. Fixed price, onsite, no software resale, and nothing sensitive touches an AI tool without your written approval.
Want to test one workflow before making a bigger AI decision? Start with the 30-Day Workflow Pilot or the smaller AI Readiness Visit. We're currently offering an introductory rate for our first three Northeast Ohio manufacturing pilots.
See the 30-Day Pilot