AI doesn’t just change an organization’s technology. AI creates disruption at the cultural level: it requires people to collaborate in new ways, gain new skills, and adopt new processes to handle the transformation it makes. If this transformation isn’t handled with care, even the strongest AI strategy will flounder. ​

​The next step is to delegate: within your organization, who is responsible for what tasks when it comes to AI? We’ll dive deeper into how you can assign AI-related responsibilities in your organization.

Collective Responsibility

Everyone has a role to play in AI transformation, not just IT. It’s important to empower people from all functions across your company to actively contribute ideas about AI applications. After you’ve chosen an idea to run with, it’s equally important to foster collaboration between business and technical teams when planning design and implementation. After deployment, teams across the technical and operational sides of the business need to be involved in maintaining AI solutions over time.

It’s the ultimate responsibility of the C-suite to own the overall AI strategy, as well as controlling investment decisions, creating an AI-ready culture, changing management and workshopping responsible AI policies. ​

As for the other leaders across an organization, there’s no single model to follow, but we’ve provided an example to show how different roles can play a part. You’ll need to determine a model that’s best suited to your strategy and objectives, the teams within your business and your AI maturity.

AI-Related Roles

The following section briefly describes the defined roles associated with AI implementation. A short description along with sample responsibilities are provided.

Business Leader

This person is a business executive responsible for operations of a particular function, line of business, or process within an organization. ​

• Source ideas from all employees.
• Identify new business models.
• Create optional communities for exchanging ideas.
• Train business experts to become Agile Product Owners.

Chief Digital Officer

The Chief Digital Officer (CDO) is a change agent who oversees the transformation of traditional operations using digital processes. Their goal is to generate new business opportunities, revenue streams, and customer services. ​

• Cultivate a culture of data sharing across the company.
• Create the AI manifesto.
• Identify catalyst projects for quick wins.
• Roll out an education program on data management best practices.

Human Resources Leader (HR)

A Human Resources (HR) director makes fundamental contributions to an organization’s culture and people development. Their wide-ranging tasks include implementing cultural development, creating internal training programs and hiring new staff according to the needs of the business.​

• Foster a “learning culture”.
• Design a “digital leadership” strategy.
• Create a hiring plan for new roles such as data scientists.
• Create a skills plan for roles impacted by AI.

IT Leader

While the Chief Digital Officer is charged with creating and implementing the overall digital strategy, an IT director oversees the day-to-day technology operations. ​

• Launch Agile working initiatives between business and IT.
• Create a “dark data” remediation plan.
• Set up agile cross-functional delivery teams and projects.
• Scale MLOps across the company.

Approaches shown in this article are extremely high level overviews of the process. To get in-depth information, try out some of Fast Lane’s state-of-the-art AI and Data Science courses.