Agent Leadership Hiring Index

As of July 2026, we track 40 open agent-leadership roles — Head of AI, Chief AI Officer, VP of AI, and AI transformation leads — across 21 companies on public job boards, with a median posted salary band of $174k–$248k (across the 25 postings that publish comp).

First edition — month-over-month deltas begin in August 2026.

By role

We normalize raw posting titles into a small set of precision-first buckets. Ambiguous titles land in Other rather than being forced into a category.

By industry

How to read this index

This is a floor, not a census. Read it as a lower bound on real demand, not the whole market.

• Sources are public ATS boards we track — Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, and a handful of public postings. Roles filled internally, posted only on LinkedIn/Indeed, or never posted at all are invisible here. The true number of companies hiring agent leadership is higher than 21.
• The title bar is precision-first. We only bucket a role when the title clearly signals it; everything ambiguous is Other. That undercounts rather than inflates — we would rather report a smaller, defensible number.
• Concentration is disclosed. One company (Writer) accounts for 40% of July 2026 postings — these are multi-region listings for the same handful of roles, not 16 distinct openings. We report the raw posting count and flag the concentration rather than de-duplicating silently.
• Comp is posted bands only. The median is computed across the 25 postings that publish a salary band — not all 40. Postings without a band are excluded from the median, not counted as zero.

We never present this index as census data. When we don't know something, we say so. See our methodology for how we collect and date every fact.

Embed this chart

Writing about the agent-leadership hiring market? Hot-link the chart below — it refreshes automatically each month, and a link back to this page is appreciated.

Download the data

Every month's aggregate numbers are available as an open CSV — posting counts, company counts, median comp bands, and the title and industry breakdowns, one row per month. Cite it freely.

Frequently asked questions

What else do we count?

This index is one of four first-party datasets we publish on the economics of agent leadership. Each answers a different question, and each is dated and sourced the same way this one is.

• Chief AI Officer salary — the published US base bands by company stage, and why the range is so wide. Use it to sanity-check the posted median above against the wider market.
• Agent leadership hiring statistics — the broader hiring picture this index samples from.
• AI agent adoption statistics — how many companies are actually deploying agents, which is what generates the demand counted here.
• AI agent pilot failure rate — how often those deployments stall, which is the strongest argument for hiring an owner at all.

What this means if you're hiring

The companies in this index are all competing for the same small talent pool. If you need to own the agent function, you have three moves:

• Not sure what you actually need first? Start with an Agent Readiness Audit — it ends with the exact role to hire.
• Not sure the seat should be full-time? Compare fractional vs. full-time before you post the role.
• Ready to hire? Estimate what the role costs, then request a shortlist.