The age of artificial intelligence is upon us. Research shows that more than half of executives across multiple sectors and regions are incorporating artificial intelligence into their function in some way, while just under half are actively integrating it into their product output. This figure is certain to grow. To become AI champions, business leaders must first ensure their teams have the right skills, players and strategy in place.
If your organisation is going to ride the wave rather than be swamped in the deluge, its leaders need to be ready. This is about Alignment, Teamwork, and making sure that you have the right Roles in place.
- Alignment: Your ambitions for AI should be in tune with your corporate strategy and agreed on across your leadership team.
- Teamwork: Your leadership team needs to take shared responsibility for AI implementation, which affects them all and cannot just be pushed out by the organisation’s technology side.
- Roles: in some circumstances a Chief AI Officer may be a valuable role, but only where they are set up to accelerate your overall strategy, and not to run a glorified innovation function.
Alignment is key
Alignment is one of the key ingredients to successful AI adoption. This plays out on a number of levels.
First, your ambitions for AI should be aligned with your corporate strategy and organised in service of it. A good AI strategy is about determining whether, and if so, how AI can help accelerate the top two or three priorities that your business is working towards. The alternative – experimenting with multiple small, disconnected proofs of concept to see what AI can do – is unlikely to result in a material level of impact. In other words: pursue a direct path to enterprise value rather than tinkering around the edges.
Secondly, your leadership team needs to be aligned around these ambitions, what you need to do to achieve them, and your current levels of capability. Misalignment around these themes is a major obstacle to AI adoption today.
The recent Global Data, Analytics and AI survey, published in late 2024, revealed a number of common areas in which there is misalignment within and between different levels of leadership. These areas range from whether their organisation had the right levels of talent or data quality to implement AI, through to what data protection, privacy and governance frameworks were then needed to do so safely.
Interestingly, leaders most often think the AI strategy is further ahead than it actually is relative to their teams. Work is clearly needed to bring leadership teams into synch on these matters.
AI adoption is a team sport
AI implementation cannot be led by the technology function alone. Unlike recent tech priorities, such as cloud migrations and data platforms which have been more infrastructural in nature, AI is likely to touch every aspect of your operations. It will affect how large parts of your workforce do their jobs, and potentially how you interact with your customers.
It therefore has to be pulled by the business as much as pushed by IT priorities. AI programmes should have cross cutting sponsorship from right across the leadership team, each of whom needs to be able to make good choices about the role that AI can play in supporting their teams and then champion that change.
Similarly, the ultimate users of the technology within those teams also need to be part of the conversation from the very start. What is true for all good product development remains true for AI; products developed carefully around user needs have a chance of being used. Those designed from afar and then imposed will never take root.
To CAIO or not to CAIO?
Within a multidisciplinary leadership team, your business may require an AI specialist. The big question is whether to appoint a dedicated Chief AI Officer (or equivalent). This appointment is gaining traction, and a CAIO can represent a valuable piece on the chessboard.
To determine whether it is the right move for your organisation, consider what you want from the role. When given ownership of accelerating business strategy through AI, a CAIO can work out well. By contrast, CAIOs with a remit of overseeing glorified innovation programmes or designing AI solutions independent from the overall corporate strategy are ill equipped to deliver productive outcomes.
On balance, we see the role of the CAIO playing out in a similar way to that of Chief Digital Officer, in that it will evolve over time, transitioning from being purely transformational into having a primary commercial agenda.
Leadership for the AI era
The need for alignment, teamwork and the right roles in your leadership team are enduring qualities. They are hardly novel to the era of machine intelligence. But they are essential if you want to master it.
________
