Despite the growing relevance of artificial intelligence (AI) for businesses, there is a lack of research on how top-level executives must be skilled in AI. Drawing on upper echelons theory, this paper explores executive AI literacy, defined as the combined AI skills of top-level executives, and its relevance for different executive roles. We conducted a text-mining analysis of 1625 executives’ online profiles and 1033 executive job postings from unicorn firms retrieved via web-scraping from an online professional social network. We find that AI skills are mostly required in product-related executive roles (vs. administrative roles). Thus, we provide an AI-specific perspective complementing prior information systems research on executives, which asserts that (non-AI) IT is driven by administrative executive roles. Our paper contributes to AI literacy literature by shedding light on the substance of executive AI literacy within firms. Lastly, we provide implications for AI-related information systems strategy.