When Leading AI, Start with Business Before Technology

Frontier LLMs are being layered on top of legacy IT environments that have grown over two decades into the sprawling architecture that businesses now run on. In the new interoperable configuration, the LLM becomes the operating system by unifying the old infrastructure and orchestrating agents across the siloed stack. What makes the shift revolutionary is that it rewrites the jobs being done inside companies by eliminating low-value activities and freeing up people to concentrate on the work humans can do well.

“Things have never changed this fast,” he says. “But they’ll never change this slow again.”

As CEO of Burtch Works, an AI-focused workforce mobilization firm, Butts runs both sides of the AI staffing equation. On the leadership side, Burtch Works places Chief AI Officers and data leaders into companies ranging from private-equity-backed businesses to commercial enterprises and mid-market firms. On the execution side, it supplies the forward-deployed engineers and data scientists who deliver on the roadmaps those leaders set. These two perspectives on the market give him an incisive view into what AI leadership really requires today. It also shapes what he brings to the University of Chicago, where he’s an instructor for the Chief AI Officer (CAIO) program at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the Data Science Institute’s Strategic Leadership in the Age of Generative and Agentic AI.

Butts’s core conviction is that too many organizations still approach AI as a technology decision. They start from the tools and work backward toward a problem. The perspective switch he calls for involves treating it instead as a business decision. That way, a new model or better agent doesn’t require rebuilding the whole strategy. “The moment you bedrock technology as the solution is the moment you’re eliminating flexibility and agility,” he says. “With the technology landscape in flux, the CAIOs who succeed are the ones who understand the business process and work closely with other executive stakeholders to orchestrate digital and human teams that deliver enterprise value.”

Operating in this environment, Butts argues, calls for a trilingual CAIO. “The three languages you need are analytics, technology, and business. Weakness in any one domain shows quickly because the role as it’s currently evolving looks much closer to Chief Strategy Officer than to the older Chief Data Officer (CDO) title it grew out of.”

Unpacking this, Butts notes that five years ago the CDO was typically someone who came up through analytics, like a PhD statistician who worked a step removed from the business. That role made sense when data and analytics were support functions feeding into the real business. With AI, however, that separation collapses. Today’s CAIO is forward deployed with the business and also responsible for delivering enterprise value through EBITDA, margin, and SG&A savings. “They understand very intimately how to run a P&L,” he says, “and how to drive efficiency and effectiveness within an existing business process.”

That shift is channeling two distinct groups into CAIO roles. The first are traditional PhDs from the CDO track who are upskilling into business. The second are MBAs and former consultants upskilling into technology and analytics. Both groups are looking for a structured way to add the languages they don’t already speak without losing the one they do. That’s what the CAIO program’s curriculum is designed to provide, with courses that move from AI strategy through interoperable infrastructure, deployment, governance, and C-suite leadership, as well as a capstone project that puts the framework into practice. Future CAIOs come out with the framing to walk into an executive team and articulate a path forward and a strategic roadmap.

After approaching AI like a technology, the next misstep Butts sees centers on what CAIOs do when they first arrive on the job. Burtch Works’ own research shows that the average CAIO tenure runs just twenty-two months, which for Butts signals that too many executives are showing up without a clear plan for their first months in the role. “The gap between what the executive team expects and what the CAIO delivers can emerge incredibly fast in these scenarios,” he says. “And once that trust breaks, it’s very hard to regain.”

His prescription is a 100-day plan modeled on what new administrations do when they take office. “You need to be able to reset and align,” he says. That means a short assessment period that includes a clear analysis of where the business is operating today and where the opportunities are for growth and profitability. Out of that will emerge a customized and incremental plan that’s agreed to across the leadership team. Without it, frustration builds and the foundation of the role starts to drift.

This is the mindset Butts wants students to take back to their companies. “The lens students come out with is one situated within the business,” he says. “It’s an outcome-based lens. They learn to build strategically and incrementally and with a clear focus on helping organizations evolve into a future desired state.”

Part of that evolution is how AI changes the jobs to be done. Low-value activities inside a business process get eliminated through technology, which brings the high-value work humans are better at anyway to the fore. The financial picture changes in important ways as well. On one side, you have the CapEx investment to build the new infrastructure, while on the other there’s the OpEx line for token usage that now scales with intensity rather than headcount, as in the older per-seat model. The CAIO has to manage both sides.

Two EQ-driven capabilities become particularly relevant here, says Butts. The first is change management, given how much of the organization is in motion at once. The second is communication and business acumen, because the CAIO works at the board level and across every line of business. “They’re meeting each stakeholder where they actually are,” Butts says. “Every company is in a different position, and that’s somewhat agnostic across industries. So you have to be an operator of sorts.”

In the end, while the technology and the infrastructure will keep evolving, what won’t change is the need for a leader who can translate what AI makes possible into what a specific business truly needs. Chicago Booth’s CAIO program is built to develop that leader and prepare them to lead the kind of transformation this moment demands.