The instinct when staffing a center of excellence is to hire for strategy and stakeholder management first, and backfill technical depth later. I've done it the other way and would do it again: I weight hands-on engineering signal — can this person actually build and evaluate the systems we're asking the rest of the org to adopt — well above slide-deck fluency.
A CoE that can't demonstrate the thing it's advising on loses credibility fast, especially with engineering teams who can tell the difference between someone who's shipped an agent pipeline and someone who's only read about one. Influence in this role comes from being able to sit down and build the reference implementation yourself.
Communication skills still matter — a lot of this job is translating technical tradeoffs for people who don't have the technical background. But I've never regretted hiring the stronger builder who needed coaching on stakeholder management. I have regretted the reverse.