Don't Kill Your Organization With The Wrong AI Strategy

Boardrooms everywhere are announcing their AI governance frameworks. They draft policies, form committees and publish usage rules. Then many leaders walk away believing they now have an AI strategy.

They don't. What they have is a fence.

Governance matters. But organizations that mistake governance for strategy are building guardrails before deciding where the road goes. Every executive, leader and board member should accept and act on four things before building out a governance structure.

AI governance is the framework that makes certain artificial intelligence is used in a productive, ethical and compliant way. That work is essential, but it is not a strategy.

Governance belongs inside your overarching AI innovation strategy, not on top of it. When governance comes first, it quietly becomes the strategy, and the organization's whole posture toward AI defaults to control. Strategy sets the direction. Governance protects the journey.

The best organizations understand that AI is not a strategy in and of itself. It is an innovation medium.

AI is one of many technologies and processes you can use to deliver far better returns on enterprise strategy. We use AI to invent with. It is not a destination. So the question is never “What is our AI strategy?” The real question is “How will we use AI, and every other tool we have, to win on the strategy we already have?”

Most organizations fear AI, and many don't fully understand it. So they do what frightened organizations always do: they build fences instead of launchpads.

That is a big mistake. AI is the best thing that could happen to your organization. Use its power to invent better human experiences, systems, tools and processes that drive better returns on strategy. Containment is not a competitive advantage. Your competitors are not winning by caging AI. They are winning by putting it to work.

This is the most important point, and it's the one most organizations get wrong.

The biggest mistake in so-called governance structures is giving the machine human work and giving the human machine work. Organizations automate empathy, judgment and relationships, and they leave their people buried in repetitive tasks a machine should own.

Start by choosing who does the work, and make that decision human centric. Machines do machine work. Humans do human work. AI is an innovation medium and a tool, so treat it like one.

Build a formal AI innovation strategy before you build governance. It must meet three requirements:

•    It must be owned by whoever owns strategic results, not IT alone and not compliance alone.

•    It must be built by a team that represents every department across the enterprise.

•    It must give customers and other experiential stakeholders a voice.

Somebody also has to own it. You can hire a Chief AI Innovation Officer, or you can bring in a fractional Chief Innovation Officer. At LeaderLogic, we fill that fractional role for organizations that need senior innovation leadership without adding another executive to the payroll. Either way, somebody needs to own this.

Organizations that skip these steps will be disrupted by competitors who use AI to create exceptional enterprise and customer value while they stay focused on AI containment.

Govern AI, absolutely. But first decide what you are building with it. Fences keep things in, and launchpads send things forward.

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