Supplementary Material for "Same Same, but Different: How Dedicated AI Leadership Roles Differentiate from Technology Leadership"

Supplementary material for the article: Markic, M., Hennemann, S. & Poeppelbuss, J. (2027). Same Same, but Different: How Dedicated AI Leadership Roles Differentiate from Technology Leadership. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) 2027. Abstract: Organizations across industries increasingly create dedicated artificial intelligence (AI) leadership roles alongside, rather than in place of, established technology leadership roles, although the literature suggests that governance demands could be absorbed by existing leadership roles. In this study, we examine how new AI leadership roles are defined and how they differ from established leadership roles. Adopting a governance-demands-and-skills lens, we conduct a large-language-model-assisted content analysis of 794 job ads. Our findings reveal that AI leadership roles entail a distinctive governance mandate – coordinating AI across business units, aligning it with strategic value, translating between technical and business domains, building governance mechanisms, and managing enablement – which existing technology leadership roles encode only partially. Therefore, we argue that AI leadership roles are configured as organizational responses to a residual governance gap that existing leadership roles leave unaddressed.