There is one question that reliably produces silence in leadership conversations: who in your company is responsible for AI producing business value? Not for keeping the systems running, that is IT. For a result actually showing up at the end.
Usually there is an honest answer: nobody. There is an interested head of IT, a supportive executive team, a few committed people in the business, but no one who has the topic in their objectives.
Why it cannot be IT
IT can provide systems, ensure security and deliver integration. It cannot decide which process in sales changes, whether a role in customer service is redefined, or what quality standard applies to an automated response. Those are business decisions, and they only get made when a business leader makes them.
If the topic sits with IT alone, you get technically sound solutions to problems nobody prioritised. They work, and they go unused.
An initiative without a business owner is an experiment. Experiments rarely survive the next budget cycle.
A model that works
What has proven itself is a split across three roles, which in mid-sized companies requires no new headcount.
- One member of the executive team who owns the topic: not operationally, but in prioritisation, budget and communication. In most cases that is not the CIO.
- For each initiative, a business owner with the result written into their objectives. Without that, no initiative starts.
- A small, named function for governance and enablement, often one person at thirty per cent of their time, whom anyone can approach and who keeps the overview of the systems in use.
Three roles, no new department. What is needed is commitment, not structure.
The mistake I see most often
A steering committee of twelve people meeting every six weeks. It produces reports and a sense of satisfaction, but no decisions, because nobody in the room personally answers for a result. Where everyone is responsible, nobody is.
A committee is useful for aligning priorities. It does not replace named ownership for each initiative.
The test for your company
At your next executive meeting, ask whose objectives include an AI-related result. If the answer is nobody's, you know why the initiatives are not progressing, and you also know the next step.