Establishing a Learning Officer Aligned with the CTO in a Midsized Business and Augmenting Your Workforce with AI Avatars

In the past two years, I have been involved in three major AI implementations at mid-sized industrial champions. They adopted AI out of necessity due to a retiring workforce, a shortage of young apprentices to fill the roles of experienced professionals, and competitive pressure from Chinese companies that are gaining ground in after-sales products and services – not just in manufacturing.

Part of the AI implementation involved establishing a Learning Officer role aligned with the CTO. In my view, this is one of the most consequential organisational decisions a mid-sized business can make today. No one would do it deliberately. However, since any digital (r)evolution goes hand in hand with change management, I decided to explain here how to properly build the Chief Learning Officer function and implement an AI Avatar program to capture knowledge of your most critical professionals.

Why This Role Exists Now

The CLO has traditionally sat inside HR, owning training catalogues and compliance courses. That model is dead. In the AI era, the CLO needs to sit at the intersection of human capability and technical infrastructure — which means the natural partnership is with the CTO, not just the CHRO. The reason is structural: the systems that capture, store, and deploy knowledge (RAG databases, avatar platforms, knowledge graphs, vector stores) are technology assets. Without CTO alignment, the CLO builds learning programs that float disconnected from the firm’s intelligence architecture. Without CLO alignment, the CTO builds systems that have no human knowledge inside them. 

By 2028, Gartner predicts 40% of employees will be mentored by AI. The CLO-CTO partnership is the organisational unit that makes this happen with intent rather than by accident.

The CLO Role — Scope, Profile, and Mandate

What this person is not

Not a training manager with a new title. Not a content curator. Those roles are already being automated in businesses that were forced to optimise their bottom line.

What this person is

A capability architect and knowledge sovereignty officer — someone who ensures that the firm’s most valuable intellectual assets (how your best people think, decide, and act) are captured, structured, and made deployable at scale, while simultaneously building the human skills that AI cannot replicate. 

The Profile — Three Non-Negotiables

1. Technological fluency without being a technologist — must understand how RAG systems work, what an embedding model does, and how avatar platforms capture knowledge, without needing to build them; the CTO builds, the CLO designs what goes inside
2. Deep knowledge of learning science — understanding how experts actually develop tacit knowledge, because you cannot capture what you have not first mapped. The CLO understands differences between AI Literacy and AI Fluency, and the fact that his/her organization must develop critical thinkers, not system users
3. Strategic business understanding — must read the firm’s strategy and translate it into capability gaps before the gap becomes a business development and/or performance problem

The Four Mandates — In Sequence

Mandate 1: Map and Prioritise Strategic Knowledge

Before capturing anything, the CLO must answer: whose knowledge, if lost tomorrow, would most damage the firm’s competitive position?

This is not the same as who is most senior. In a manufacturing SME, it might be the master toolmaker with 28 years of process intuition. In a sales organisation, it is the person who closes deals that should not close by all rational metrics.

The method is a Knowledge Risk Matrix: 

High uniqueness + high concentration + low succession depth + high strategic leverage = the first avatar candidates. This matrix is built by the CLO with CHRO data and delivered to the CTO as the avatar to build a prioritisation list.

I invite everyone to listen to Episode 82 of AI Snacks, featuring Manuj Aggarwal. He strategically uses avatars to train employees in his organisation.

Mandate 2: Build the Avatar Program (with the CTO)

This is where the CLO-CTO axis becomes concrete. The CLO defines the knowledge architecture; the CTO owns the technical implementation. The division of labour:

CLO owns:

• Knowledge elicitation — structured interview protocols, case-based questioning, observation sessions designed to surface tacit knowledge that experts cannot articulate without prompting
• Consent and governance framework — what the avatar can say, to whom, in what context; the ethical boundary conditions
• Validation — testing whether the avatar actually represents the expert accurately, and correcting it when it drifts
• Integration with training programs— how the avatar is used in onboarding, role-play, and continuous development

CTO owns:

• Platform selection and integration (Uare.ai / Tavus / D-ID / custom stack)
• Data pipeline from interview recordings and documents to the knowledge model
• VRAM and infrastructure provisioning for self-hosted models
• Security architecture — who can query which avatar and with what permissions
• Integration with ERP, HR systems, and CRM systems for contextual grounding

The joint deliverable is an avatar that answers not from general LLM knowledge but from the specific expert’s documented reasoning — with a clear “I don’t know” when the knowledge was never captured, rather than a confident hallucination. 

Mandate 3: Align Strategy and Training — The Capability Roadmap

The deepest failure mode in corporate learning is training people for yesterday’s strategy. The CLO must sit in strategic planning sessions and translate strategic decisions directly into capability requirements — before the hiring or training brief is written.

The process looks like this: 

Step 1 — Strategy translation (quarterly)
When the leadership team agrees on strategic priorities (“we are expanding into the German automotive supply chain” or “we are implementing a two-model AI architecture for procurement”), the CLO maps this to a capability question: what must our people know and be able to do that they currently cannot?

Step 2 — Gap quantification
Use AI-assisted skills assessment tools (Gloat, Eightfold, or custom) to map current capability against required capability at the role level — not just the department level. 

Step 3 — Build vs. buy vs. borrow
For each gap: can we train it (CLO leads), hire it (CHRO leads), or deploy an AI tool that closes it (CTO leads)? The CLO is the convener of this decision, not the sole owner.

Step 4 — Embed learning in workflow
By 2026, learning that happens outside the workflow is increasingly ineffective. The CLO’s job is to ensure that capability development is embedded in the actual work — an avatar that coaches during a real procurement negotiation, not a course taken on a lunch break.

Mandate 4: Protect and Grow the Firm’s Knowledge Sovereignty

This is the least understood but most strategically important mandate. Every firm has knowledge that is genuinely proprietary — not in IP law terms, but in competitive terms. The CLO-CTO partnership is responsible for ensuring this knowledge is:

• Captured before it walks out the door (retirement, resignation, restructuring)
• Structured so AI systems can retrieve and reason with it, not just store it as PDFs
• Governed so it is not inadvertently leaked into external AI systems through shadow AI use (this point is important – my survey on global SMEs shows 67% of shadow AI usage across all the geographies)
• Continuously updated as strategy and practice evolve — a knowledge base that is not maintained degrades within 18 months

The technical architecture for this is the internal Knowledge Graph — a structured map of the firm’s expertise, relationships between concepts, and provenance of knowledge (who knows what, and how confident is that assessment). The CTO builds the graph; the CLO ensures it reflects reality. 

The CLO-CTO Operating Rhythm

For this partnership to function without bureaucracy, three lightweight mechanisms are sufficient: 

Weekly sync (30 minutes): What knowledge capture sessions are running this week? What technical blockers exist? What avatar queries have surfaced gaps?

Monthly strategy alignment (90 minutes): Review the capability roadmap against strategic priorities. What has changed? What new knowledge risks have emerged? What avatar deployments are ready for wider rollout?

Quarterly knowledge audit (half day): Review the knowledge risk matrix. Which avatars need updating? Which critical knowledge holders have not yet been captured? What training programs are showing impact vs. compliance completion?

The Governance Guardrails — What the CLO Must Own

Three boundaries that cannot be delegated to the CTO: 

1. Human primacy in high-stakes decisions — the CLO defines which decisions must always involve a human, regardless of AI confidence; this list is reviewed quarterly as capabilities evolve
2. Expert consent and dignity — the person whose knowledge is captured retains review rights over their avatar; if they leave the firm, a defined sunset protocol governs how long the avatar remains active
3. Learning not replacement — the avatar program is explicitly framed as capability amplification, not workforce reduction; the CLO owns the communication and cultural positioning of this, or the program will face resistance that no technical excellence can overcome

The Sequencing — First 12 Months

The organisations that build this deliberately in the next 18 months will compound an advantage that is genuinely hard to replicate — not because the technology is unavailable, but because the knowledge inside the technology is uniquely theirs.

The experience from my three AI implementations in 2025 and 2026 shows that establishing a CLO role and an AI avatar program is feasible even in the context of continental Europe. It is feasible even when capturing knowledge from experienced workers requires implementing video and video-to-text tools to ensure workflows are documented without errors, and redesigned and simplified where necessary.