Copilot is switched on in most organisations now. Almost nothing has changed.
That’s because most organisations don’t have an AI problem. They have an IT problem.
Not because IT people are the obstacle. In large enterprises, IT usually sits at the leadership table with a strategic remit and the bandwidth to build genuine AI capability, and does exactly that. In the mid-market, IT is often one person, or a small support team, whose job is keeping systems up and the helpdesk answered. Nobody designed that role to carry a business transformation. It was built to stop things breaking.
How AI lands on the IT desk
So when AI turns up, it lands on the only technical desk in the building, and gets run the way that desk runs everything: procured, licensed, switched on, measured by whether people logged in. I sat in a steering group recently where this was laid bare. Everyone agreed AI mattered. Nobody had actually challenged IT’s instinct to treat it as a rollout, until someone from the business side said, plainly, that caution was now the bigger risk, not the smaller one.
I’ve also watched the opposite failure, in a mid-market financial services firm with genuinely capable, experienced people throughout the business. The skill was never the constraint. What was missing was someone with the clear authority to decide what happened next, because that decision sat outside what IT was resourced or expected to own, and nobody else in the business had been asked to own it either.
The real question
Different businesses, same gap. Mid-market IT rarely fails because it’s incompetent. It fails because nobody built it to make the call this needs.
Waiting for a support function to deliver a strategic outcome is how good mid-market businesses fall behind competitors twice their size, with half the excuse.
So the real question for your business isn’t whether IT has switched AI on. It’s whether anyone outside IT has actually decided what you want it to change.
Recognising that is step one.
If you are working out who should own AI in your business and what you want it to change, I would be glad to help. You can read about our Fractional Chief AI Officer support on our services page or get in touch.
This article was first shared as a post on LinkedIn.