Say a CHRO in a German industrial group holds a signed requisition for a Head of Data and AI. The hiring manager keeps forwarding people who run a data-science team, and platform managers who once sponsored a pilot. The requisition asked for something else: a Head-level job in which data operations and AI delivery are the same person's problem in the same week. That reading is Beyond Chiefs' judgment.
Picture the weekly review inside a German retailer. One agenda tracks platform debt, data contracts, and how long the business waits for features. The other tracks merchandising-model releases, store pilots, and the cost of keeping those models in production. While those agendas stay on two calendars, the "and" in the title is typography. The role exists when one Head sets a single priority across both and stands behind it in front of the sitting executive team.
A data-science team lead can run methods, models, and a specialist group well. That is a different assignment. The Head of Data and AI you are trying to hire has to run data operations and AI delivery as one job: data availability, reuse in production, model release and runtime, and the escalation when those two streams block each other.
If the CV stack in front of you is mostly team leads, the posting narrowed the seat, or the market misread it. Tighten the brief before you open interviews. Otherwise you will hire team leadership and later watch the same split persist: the platform queue and the release calendar still do not meet.
Head of Data and AI names a combined operation. The platform has to deliver features in time for models to learn and run. The AI side has to feed back which data is missing, which quality issue is blocking a release, and what load the runtime puts on the platform. A Head who only defends the warehouse and treats AI as a side brief is not doing this job. A Head who only ships demos and treats data as a supplier is not doing it either.
The test lives in the week, not in the job title. Which tickets land on the same desk. Which conflict between platform and model the person actually decides. Who hears that priority. If those answers stay vague, you are staffing a label, not an operation.
Executive search for this role in Germany should listen for a real collision. Ask candidates to walk through a week when data operations and a model release pulled in opposite directions, what they decided, who they told, and what then changed in the platform queue and in the release calendar. A polished title slide does not answer that.
The job stays at Head level and reports into an executive team that is already in place. Treat it as a Head mandate, not as a board appointment smuggled in under a quieter name. If you want this seat staffed as a combined operation, commission a retained executive search for the Head role in Germany.
If your posting treats AI as a footnote under data, or treats data as a supplier to a pilot, rewrite the brief before the search runs. The market will otherwise deliver exactly the split you already wrote down.
