If you want to understand why AI is stalling in your organisation, stop looking at the technology. Start looking at the suspects.
The suspects
The Anxious Leader just came off a board meeting where someone mentioned a competitor is already deploying AI at scale. She does not know exactly what that means. Neither does the person who said it. The anxiety is real, the pressure is visible, and the next all-hands now includes an AI slide that did not exist three weeks ago.
The Overwhelmed Enabler has been asked to make the AI strategy happen. He is still waiting for someone to tell him what the strategy is. In the meantime he is fielding requests from seven directions, none talking to each other, all considering their need the priority.
The Enthusiast has been using AI for four months with real results. She proposed scaling it across the business and is waiting for sign-off from a committee that has met twice and reached no conclusions. She knows the rules. She is playing by them. That is the problem.
The Blocker is not against AI. He simply knows what happens when things go wrong and who gets blamed. Nobody has shown him what good governance looks like in practice. So he says no, carefully and consistently, because yes feels like personal exposure. He is cast as the villain. He is the most underserved person in the room.
The Quietly Terrified says all the right things in meetings. At her desk she is running searches she would not say out loud, trying to understand whether her role exists in three years.
The Builder does not know the rules exist. He is feeding client briefs into a free AI tool, getting impressive results, and sharing them enthusiastically. He has not considered where that data goes or what the firm’s liability looks like when a client finds out. Somewhere in his activity trail sits a GDPR breach nobody has yet noticed.
Nobody owns the whole
Six rational responses. One organisation that is busy, anxious, and one data breach away from a potential crisis.
This is not a technology problem. It is what happens when a cross-functional technology lands in an organisational structure never designed to coordinate it. Every person owns a piece. Nobody owns the whole. Without someone whose job it is to hold them all together, the chaos is not a surprise. It is a certainty.
Most organisations are still waiting for that person to appear.
Which of these suspects works in your organisation, and who is sitting outside this cast entirely?
If you recognise some of these colleagues and would like help bringing them together around a clear AI direction, I would be glad to talk. There is more about how we work, including our Fractional Chief AI Officer support, on our services page, and you are very welcome to get in touch.
This article was first shared as a post on LinkedIn.