Who Owns AI In The C-Suite?

Nada Usina is CEO & Co-Founder of NU Advisory Partners.

​AI spending is skyrocketing and employees in nearly every industry and role are being asked to implement it. Yet many companies still haven’t decided who is ultimately responsible for making it work. The technology touches nearly every part of the business, which means ownership can quickly become muddled across the CEO, technology, finance, legal, HR and operations.​

I’ve spent decades in leadership positions at pivotal moments where digital transformation and the mobile movement completely upended industries. I held executive roles at Nokia, broadcast.com and Yahoo! during major technological shifts that forced companies to reconsider how responsibilities were divided and who owned what. Now AI is forcing the C-Suite to examine talent and ownership in a similar manner. ​

Tech Transformation Ownership Through The Eras​

During the dot-com era, companies rushed to go online, assigning parts of building digital businesses and e-commerce channels to existing executives. This raised key questions about how to digitize a business. Did the task belong to the CTO because engineers had to build the infrastructure? Was it the CMO’s responsibility because it changed how companies reached customers? Did it belong to the revenue leader because companies could now sell directly to consumers?​

Looking back at the winners and losers of that era, I can say there was no universal answer. The structure depended on the company, its industry and what it expected digital to accomplish. Consumer businesses moved first. Financial services and healthcare followed as they worked through added complexity and regulation. Industrial companies generally took longer. The executives that succeeded were the most keen to understand the technology and how it applied to their specific business.​