Bank of Ireland Names Prag Sharma as Chief AI Officer

What happened

Bank of Ireland has named Prag Sharma, formerly of Citigroup, as its first chief AI officer, establishing a dedicated executive role for artificial intelligence governance and deployment. The appointment gives Ireland's retail and commercial banking sector a named senior leader accountable for how AI is used across the bank's operations.

The move signals a formalisation of AI oversight at board level, positioning the function alongside other C-suite disciplines such as risk, technology and customer experience, rather than leaving AI strategy dispersed across IT or innovation teams.

Why it matters

Banks are increasingly using AI to shape everything from fraud detection to personalised offers, chat-based service and credit decisioning — all of which directly touch how customers experience the institution. Appointing a named executive to own AI accountability suggests banks are recognising that AI decisions are not purely technical; they carry service, trust and behavioural consequences that need dedicated governance.

For customer experience and behavioural economics practitioners, this is a signal that AI-driven personalisation, automation and decision-making are moving from experimental pilots to structurally governed, board-level priorities — with implications for transparency, fairness and the customer's sense of control over automated decisions.

The Renascence take

A chief AI officer title is easy to read as a technology story. The more interesting question is what such a role actually protects: not model accuracy, but customer trust in moments where a machine — not a person — is making a judgement call about them.

The real test of this appointment won't be the algorithms Bank of Ireland deploys, but how it explains AI-driven decisions to customers when things go wrong — a declined loan, a flagged transaction, a chatbot that can't resolve a query. Most organisations under-invest in that explanatory layer, treating it as a legal disclosure problem rather than a trust-design one. A customer-obsessed operator would use this kind of appointment to mandate that every AI system touching a customer journey comes with a built-in, human-readable "why" — because in financial services, perceived fairness of a decision often matters as much to the customer as the decision itself.