What Morrisons announced
Morrisons confirmed on September 24 that Dr Mohsen Ghasempour will take on the newly created role of Chief AI Officer starting October 1, reporting directly to chief executive Rami Baitieh. The role is built around establishing a centralized data science and AI function for the grocer, with a mandate spanning customer growth, operational efficiency, and colleague empowerment across the entire business. That is a considerably broader remit than a typical head of data science role carries, and the direct line to the CEO signals that Morrisons wants AI strategy decided at the same table as commercial strategy, with the same visibility and the same accountability, rather than filtered up through several layers of a conventional technology organization first.
Baitieh's own statement leaned into that framing, calling Ghasempour a recognized expert with hands on experience unlocking technology to deliver measurable business impact for customers and colleagues alike. Ghasempour's own comment was about building a team to use AI effectively and responsibly in the years ahead, language that reads as a deliberate signal to a grocery workforce that has watched automation announcements land roughly alongside job cuts in other sectors, and one Morrisons will need to back up with how it actually handles redeployment and retraining as the AI function scales.
The hire is the story, not just the title
What makes this appointment notable is less that Morrisons created a Chief AI Officer role at all, since plenty of large retailers have already done that over the past two years, and more that Morrisons filled it by hiring the person who already held the equivalent role at Kingfisher, a competitor in a different retail vertical but a direct peer in terms of scale and the kind of AI work being judged against real commercial results. Ghasempour established Kingfisher's European AI strategy before this move, and before that held senior technology roles at The Hut Group, giving him a decade-plus track record across two different retail formats.
That career path matters for how seriously to take the appointment. Ghasempour is a specialist retail technologist being recruited specifically for AI leadership experience gained at a comparable scale, a hiring pattern that suggests Morrisons is treating this as a genuine skills acquisition and not simply a title created to look current to investors and the press. Boards that create executive roles without a credible candidate already in hand tend to settle for an internal promotion or a generalist; going outside to a named peer competitor signals real intent.
Why the talent market is moving this fast
Ghasempour's move lands in the same week that PwC UK also named its own Chief AI Officer, which is a useful data point on how quickly this specific leadership role has gone from novel to standard across UK enterprise. Two years ago, AI strategy at most large retailers sat inside an existing CIO, CDO, or CTO's portfolio as one priority among several. The emergence of a dedicated, CEO reporting AI executive function suggests boards now consider AI strategy important enough to warrant its own seat, separate from infrastructure and data governance.
That creates a genuine talent scarcity problem for every retailer chasing the same trend at the same time. There are relatively few executives who have actually run AI strategy at retail scale and can point to measurable business impact rather than a slide deck of pilot projects that never quite shipped, which is exactly why Morrisons went outside rather than promoting internally, and exactly why we should expect more of these moves over the next year to be direct hires from a short list of peer companies rather than organic internal promotions through the existing technology ranks.
The organizational design question every retail CIO should be asking
If your retail organization has not yet decided whether AI strategy deserves a dedicated executive separate from the CIO or CTO function, Morrisons' move is a forcing function to have that conversation now rather than after a competitor has already recruited the best available candidates. The decision is not purely symbolic: a Chief AI Officer reporting directly to the CEO has a different mandate, budget authority, and political standing than an AI lead buried two levels down in a technology organization.
The risk on the other side is real too. Creating a parallel AI function that does not integrate cleanly with existing data, infrastructure, and security teams can produce exactly the kind of turf conflict that slows AI projects down rather than accelerating them. Morrisons' choice to centralize data science and AI under one function, rather than leaving AI initiatives scattered across existing teams, is the detail worth copying regardless of whether the title itself is a Chief AI Officer or something else.
What Ghasempour will likely bring from Kingfisher
Kingfisher's AI work under Ghasempour's tenure included conversational commerce tools and AI driven product discovery that the retailer has credited with measurable conversion gains in its own investor disclosures. That is a meaningfully different skill set than the supply chain and inventory forecasting work that dominates grocery AI headlines, and it suggests Morrisons may be positioning for a stronger push into customer facing AI, not just the operational efficiency use cases that have defined grocery AI spend so far.
That is a reasonable bet. Grocery retailers have largely converged on similar operational AI deployments, demand forecasting, waste reduction, labor scheduling, because the ROI case is well proven and the vendor market is mature. Customer facing AI in grocery, personalized search, conversational shopping assistants, dynamic merchandising, is far less settled, and a leader with direct experience shipping that kind of product elsewhere is a real asset if Morrisons intends to compete there.
The roadmap implication
If you lead technology at a retailer that still treats AI as a workstream inside an existing function, this appointment and the parallel PwC UK hire are evidence the market is moving toward dedicated AI executive roles faster than most organizational charts have caught up. Waiting to see how this trend plays out means competing for AI leadership talent later, against more companies, with a smaller remaining pool of candidates who have actually delivered measurable results.
The more durable lesson is about where that talent comes from. Ghasempour did not arrive from a consultancy or a pure technology vendor, he arrived from a direct retail peer with comparable scale and comparable problems. If you are building out an AI leadership function, the candidates worth the most are the ones who have already made the specific tradeoffs your organization is about to face, not the ones with the most impressive AI vocabulary.
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