The technology advances, but the thinking remains human work.
Em um momento em que a inteligência artificial deixa de ser promessa e passa a ser imperativo estratégico, as empresas brasileiras enfrentam uma questão que vai além da tecnologia: quem será capaz de conduzir organizações inteiras por uma transformação que não tem precedentes claros? Uma pesquisa da Robert Half com cem executivos brasileiros revela que 92% acreditam que o papel do Chief AI Officer se tornará substancialmente mais relevante até 2035 — sinal de que o mercado já reconhece que a era digital exige uma nova arquitetura de liderança, construída sobre a rara combinação de domínio técnico e sabedoria humana.
- A velocidade da transformação digital está superando a capacidade das estruturas tradicionais de liderança de acompanhá-la, criando um vácuo estratégico nas cúpulas corporativas.
- Cinco novos perfis executivos — CAIO, CAIDO, CINO, CTO e CTRO — emergem como respostas institucionais à pressão por inovação, governança de dados e gestão de mudança simultâneas.
- 63% dos executivos apontam a capacidade de reorganizar e adaptar equipes como competência essencial, revelando que o maior desafio não é tecnológico, mas humano.
- Empresas enfrentam a contradição de precisar se reinventar rapidamente sem perder coerência operacional — e o mercado de talentos ainda não formou líderes em escala suficiente para esse papel.
- A demanda por executivos que unam visão tecnológica, ética de dados e gestão de pessoas deixou de ser tendência futura: ela já está pressionando o recrutamento de alto nível no Brasil.
As empresas brasileiras estão em busca de um novo tipo de executivo — alguém que transite com igual fluência entre inteligência artificial e estratégia de negócios. Uma pesquisa da Robert Half com cem executivos de diferentes níveis hierárquicos mostra a dimensão dessa transformação: 92% acreditam que o papel do Chief AI Officer se tornará muito mais relevante na próxima década, e 91% esperam que cargos ligados a IA e gestão de dados ocupem posição estratégica central até 2035.
Cinco funções executivas se destacam como protagonistas dessa reconfiguração. O Chief Innovation Officer ancora empresas em crescimento acelerado. O Chief Technology Officer expande seu escopo para além da infraestrutura, assumindo a orquestração da transformação digital e da cibersegurança. O Chief Strategy Officer navega mercados voláteis combinando visão de longo prazo com análise macroeconômica. O Chief AI & Data Officer surge como talvez o cargo mais estrategicamente consequente da década, responsável por implementar IA de forma ética e alinhada aos objetivos do negócio. E o Chief Transformation Officer atua como elo entre pessoas, tecnologia e operações em ambientes de mudança contínua.
Mario Custódio, diretor executivo de recrutamento da Robert Half, enquadra o desafio não como um problema tecnológico, mas humano: a próxima onda de transformação será conduzida por pessoas — suas habilidades, sua experiência, sua capacidade de aplicar mudanças tecnológicas de forma colaborativa.
O retrato que emerge da pesquisa é de pressão crescente. As organizações precisam evoluir rapidamente sem sacrificar a execução ou a coesão interna. Sessenta e três por cento dos executivos apontaram a capacidade de reorganizar equipes como competência essencial para o período à frente. Não se trata de contratar um único gênio da tecnologia — trata-se de formar líderes capazes de mover pessoas pela incerteza enquanto mantêm as organizações funcionando durante sua própria reinvenção.
Brazilian companies are hunting for a new breed of executive—one who speaks fluently in both the language of artificial intelligence and the language of business strategy. A survey by Robert Half of one hundred Brazilian executives across board members, senior leadership, and middle management reveals the scale of this shift: ninety-two percent believe the role of Chief AI Officer will become substantially more important over the next decade. The finding is part of a broader reshaping of the C-suite, driven by the accelerating collision between digital transformation and organizational survival.
The research paints a picture of executive roles in flux. Eighty percent of respondents expect the Chief Data Officer position to grow in strategic weight. More broadly, ninety-one percent of those surveyed believe that positions tied to artificial intelligence and data management will hold significantly greater strategic importance by 2035. Five roles in particular are emerging as central to this transformation: the Chief Innovation Officer, the Chief AI & Data Officer, the Chief Technology Officer, the Chief Strategy Officer, and the Chief Transformation Officer. Each carries a distinct mandate, but all share a common thread—they exist to navigate the company through rapid, often disorienting change.
The Chief Innovation Officer is expected to anchor companies pursuing aggressive growth and cultural adaptation. The Chief Technology Officer's remit is expanding beyond infrastructure into the broader orchestration of digital transformation, cybersecurity, and technological strategy. The Chief Strategy Officer faces pressure to build organizational value while steering through volatile markets, combining market vision with macroeconomic analysis and managing expansion or restructuring. The Chief AI & Data Officer emerges as perhaps the most strategically consequential role of the coming decade, tasked with implementing artificial intelligence in ways that are both ethically sound and aligned with business objectives—a role that demands fluency in innovation, data governance, and corporate accountability. The Chief Transformation Officer, meanwhile, becomes the connective tissue between human resources, technology, and operations, managing large-scale organizational change in environments of constant flux.
Mario Custódio, executive director of recruitment at Robert Half, frames this not as a technology problem but as a human one. The fifth industrial revolution and the waves of digital transformation expected ahead will be driven by people, he argues—by their skills, their experience, their capacity to understand and apply technological change collaboratively. The technology advances, but the thinking and the coordination remain fundamentally human work.
What emerges from the research is a portrait of mounting pressure. Companies must evolve rapidly without sacrificing execution or internal alignment. Sixty-three percent of executives surveyed identified the ability to reorganize and adapt the workforce as an essential leadership competency for the coming period. This is not a problem that hiring a single brilliant technologist solves. It requires leaders who understand digital transformation deeply but also know how to move people through uncertainty, how to maintain coherence across functions, how to keep organizations functioning while they remake themselves. The demand for such leaders is no longer emerging—it is here, and it is accelerating.
Notable Quotes
Organizations change and transform because of people. Their skills and experiences will evolve, but the application and understanding will come from human minds and collaborative action.— Mario Custódio, executive director of recruitment at Robert Half
There is growing pressure for companies to evolve rapidly without losing execution capacity and internal alignment. This creates demand for leaders who understand digital transformation but also know how to mobilize teams in high-volatility scenarios.— Mario Custódio, Robert Half
The Hearth Conversation Another angle on the story
Why does a Chief AI Officer matter more than, say, a really strong Chief Technology Officer who understands AI?
Because the CTO is typically focused on infrastructure, systems, security—the plumbing. A Chief AI Officer is responsible for how the organization actually thinks about and deploys artificial intelligence as a business capability. It's the difference between owning the tools and owning the strategy.
And the survey says ninety-two percent of executives expect this role to grow. That's remarkably high consensus. What explains that?
Every major company is grappling with the same question: how do we integrate AI into what we do without losing control, without breaking our culture, without making decisions that haunt us later? That's not a technical question. It's a governance question. And it needs someone at the table with real authority.
The Chief Transformation Officer—that sounds like a role that might have existed before, just under a different name.
Maybe in spirit. But the scale is different now. You're not managing a single merger or a shift to a new business model. You're managing constant, overlapping waves of change. The role needs someone who can hold the organization together while it's being rebuilt.
Custódio says the technology advances but the thinking remains human. Does that feel true to you, or is that just what executives want to hear?
It's what the data suggests. Sixty-three percent of executives identified workforce adaptation as essential. If this were purely about technology, that number would be lower. The bottleneck is human—how to move people, how to build new skills, how to maintain trust through disruption.
So what happens to the executives who don't adapt? The ones who see AI as just another IT project?
They'll find themselves managing from the margins. The companies that treat AI as a strategic imperative—not a department—will pull ahead. And the executives who understand that will be the ones companies fight to hire.