Deconstructor of Fun recruiter warns 'Head of AI' hiring is four different jobs

Recruiter Miki Blasko says studio demand for AI hires has exploded. He says clarity on what those hires should do has not moved. He splits 'Head of AI' into four mandates with different backgrounds and success metrics. In his experience, undefined mandates lead to costly terminations within a year. "If you cannot describe the role without using the word AI, chances are, you have not decided anything yet." - Miki Blasko, Recruiter, Deconstructor of Fun Talent

A founder of a $50M+ developer asked Blasko to find a Head of AI.
Twenty minutes of scoping showed he needed a production engineer.
That engineer's job was wiring generative tooling into an existing art pipeline.
The budgeted six-figure leader would likely have spent a year with nothing to lead.
Blasko says his team has some version of that conversation almost weekly.

Director of AI, Head of AI and AI Chief of Staff can describe very different jobs.
Netflix listed a Director of Generative AI for Games at $430,000 to $840,000.
Other roles with generative AI in the title are posted as hourly contract work.
Blasko says many job descriptions are now AI-written and miss the company's stage.
"The best candidates are usually inside another function: a technical director who built the pipeline tooling, an analytics lead who shipped the moderation model." - Miki Blasko, Recruiter, Deconstructor of Fun Talent
Keyword searches mostly surface people who optimized their LinkedIn headlines.

The research leader pushes model capability.
The internal transformation leader changes how the company operates.
The creative-pipeline leader embeds generative tooling into art and content.
The live-ops leader applies ML to player data, moderation and matchmaking.
One public gaming company hired a transformation leader when its studios needed live-ops execution.
That head of AI left within the first year.
"A CEO who has not decided which mandate they are buying can end up with a leader optimizing the wrong thing." - Miki Blasko, Recruiter, Deconstructor of Fun Talent

Blasko advises hiring individual contributors first when the use case is clear and bounded.
His examples are automating QA, speeding the texture pipeline and building live-ops analytics.
A senior AI leader is premature if existing leadership can direct that work.
Hire the head first when AI is cross-cutting and politically contested across teams.
A leader also fits when scale requires authority to make tradeoffs and kill projects.
Blasko says both failures buy capability without judgment or judgment without application.
He says the operational layer captures value first, across coding, QA, marketing, analytics and art.
Square Enix has committed to automating 70% of QA and debugging by end-2027.

EA had board-level commitment, top-tier vendor partnerships and strong top-down intent.
Business Insider reported that its in-house ReefGPT chatbot produced faulty code and hallucinations.
Developers had to stop work and fix the tool's output.
Leadership pressed roughly 15,000 employees to use AI for nearly everything.
Staff widely read the push as cost-cutting after the $55 billion debt-financed acquisition.
Blasko says correctly defined roles, hired in order, close the gap between commitment and capability.

An IDC survey found 66% of enterprises expect to slow entry-level hiring.
The same survey found 91% report roles already changing or disappearing due to AI.
Recent-graduate hiring at large tech firms fell 25% YoY in 2024.
That hiring sits roughly 50% below pre-pandemic levels.
Blasko warns that seniors who only edit AI output will approve work that merely looks right.
He says client data shows AI-equipped juniors approach senior code output within months.

For Investors & VC: Add AI-hire mandate definition to studio diligence before underwriting leadership headcount in growth plans.
For Service Vendors: Pitch scoped pipeline-integration and QA-automation engagements to studios stalled mid-search for AI leadership.