Talent Intelligence for Emerging Leadership Functions

Title-based search works well when a function has existed long enough for the market to converge on common naming conventions and a reasonably standard scope. Emerging functions have not had time to converge. In the early years of any new function, organizations experiment with different titles, different reporting structures, and different combinations of adjacent responsibilities, because there is no established playbook yet for exactly how the function should be organized.

This means a title-based search for an emerging function will typically surface an inconsistent and incomplete picture: some genuinely relevant leaders will be missed because their title does not match the search term, while some matched titles will turn out to describe a meaningfully different scope of work than the one actually needed.

The practical implication is that talent intelligence for emerging functions has to start one step earlier than for established functions — by first mapping how the market is currently organizing the underlying mandate, before attempting to map specific people into it.

For an emerging function, the first mapping task is defining the actual mandate as specifically as possible — the problem the function exists to solve, the decisions it needs authority over, and the adjacent functions it needs to coordinate with — independent of what any particular company happens to call it.

With the mandate defined, the next step is a broad search across multiple plausible titles and reporting structures rather than a single title string. For a function focused on applied AI oversight, for example, a broad search might reasonably include titles like Head of AI, VP of Data Science, Chief Digital Officer, and even general VP of Engineering or VP of Operations titles at companies known to have embedded AI oversight inside an existing function rather than creating a new one.

Structured career review is particularly useful at this stage, since it allows a reviewer to look past an unhelpful or generic title and assess actual role description, reporting line, and career trajectory to judge whether a given leader's real mandate matches the one being searched for.

A second, often overlooked part of mapping an emerging function is understanding not just who holds relevant titles, but where companies have chosen to place the function organizationally — does it report to the CEO, the CFO, the CTO, or a chief operating role, and is it a standalone function or folded into an existing one.

This organizational placement mapping matters for two reasons. First, it directly informs where a company building this function for the first time should place it, since looking at how a reasonable comparison set has made this choice provides a useful, evidence-based starting point rather than an arbitrary internal debate. Second, it affects the talent search itself, since leaders currently in the function will have been shaped by wherever it sits — someone running an AI function that reports to a CFO is likely to have developed differently than someone running an equivalent function that reports to a CTO.

Tracking this placement pattern across a reasonable comparison set, even a relatively small one, often reveals whether the market has started to converge on a dominant structure or whether significant variation still exists — information that is itself useful for a hiring company deciding how to structure the role.

Consider an illustrative, invented scenario: a mid-sized financial services company wants to create a leadership role responsible for AI governance and oversight, a function that did not meaningfully exist at most companies in this sector five years earlier. A mapping exercise reviews a constructed set of 25 companies of comparable size and sector to see where, organizationally, this type of oversight mandate currently sits.

The chart below is a constructed illustration only, built to demonstrate how this kind of placement mapping is visualized. The denominator is the invented 25-company comparison set; each bar shows the invented number of those companies where AI governance oversight currently reports into the named function.

In this invented scenario, the mapping shows meaningful variation rather than a single dominant structure: 9 of the 25 constructed peer companies place AI governance oversight under the CTO or CIO, 7 place it under the CFO or a dedicated risk function, 5 have it reporting directly to the CEO, and 4 have folded the mandate into an existing data or analytics leadership role rather than creating a distinct one.

This illustrative pattern — invented for this example only — would suggest to a company making this decision that the market has not yet converged on a standard placement, meaning the choice should be driven more by the company's own specific risk profile and strategic priority for AI than by simply copying a dominant market pattern, since in this constructed scenario no single pattern dominates.

It also directly shapes the talent search: because the CFO/Risk placement accounts for a meaningful share of this invented comparison set, a search limited only to CTO-adjacent titles would in this scenario miss candidates whose relevant experience developed under a risk-oriented reporting structure, who might bring a different but equally relevant perspective to the role.

A further challenge with emerging functions is that, almost by definition, very few candidates will have five or ten years of experience specifically in the role as currently defined, since the function itself may only be a few years old. This means assessment criteria need to weight adjacent and transferable experience more heavily than tenure in an identically titled role.

Useful adjacent signals include direct experience with the underlying technical or regulatory substance of the function even if gained under a different title, evidence of having built a function or process from scratch in a different but structurally similar context, and a career pattern that shows comfort operating in ambiguous, not-yet-standardized mandates rather than well-established functional roles.

It is also worth explicitly distinguishing between candidates who have led the function at scale within a single large organization and candidates who have built the function from nothing in a smaller or earlier-stage setting, since these represent genuinely different kinds of experience that may suit different company situations.

The most common pitfall is defaulting to a title-based search because it is familiar and fast, even though it is specifically unreliable for functions that have not yet standardized. A second pitfall is assuming organizational placement has converged on a single dominant pattern and copying it without checking, when in reality many emerging functions show meaningful placement variation across the market for several years.

A third pitfall is applying established-function assessment criteria — specifically, requiring extensive tenure in an identically titled prior role — to an emerging function where such tenure simply does not yet exist in the market at meaningful scale. A fourth is searching too narrowly within a single adjacent function (for example, only within data and analytics) and missing equally relevant experience that developed under a different adjacent function, such as risk or operations.

A workable approach has four steps. First, define the function's mandate explicitly and specifically — the decisions it needs authority over and the problems it exists to solve — independent of any particular title. Second, map organizational placement across a reasonable comparison set to understand whether the market has converged on a dominant reporting structure or still shows meaningful variation, since this informs both internal placement decisions and search scope.

Third, search broadly across multiple plausible titles and adjacent functions rather than a single title string, using tools like structured career review and targeted prompts on existing results to assess actual mandate match rather than relying on title alone. Fourth, weight assessment criteria toward adjacent and transferable experience rather than requiring tenure in an identically titled prior role, since for a genuinely emerging function that kind of direct precedent may not yet exist at meaningful scale in the market.