There’s a peculiar sort of panic happening in boardrooms. Everyone knows they need to “do AI” but nobody wants to admit they’re not entirely sure what they’re doing.
The pressure is real. Competitors are announcing initiatives. Investors are asking pointed questions. Marketing has already updated the website to mention “AI-powered” three times per page.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: most of these projects are going to fail. Not because the technology doesn’t work, but because of what’s missing from the table.
The Pattern of Failure
You’ve probably seen it. The IT team builds something technically impressive. The business units have no idea what to do with it. Six months later, it’s quietly shelved and everyone pretends it never happened.
Why does this keep happening?
Because most organisations are missing a crucial role: someone senior enough to drive genuine transformation.
This isn’t a job for your IT director, who’s already drowning in keeping the lights on. It’s not a job for your innovation team, who lack the clout to change how departments actually work. And it’s definitely not a job for a junior “AI champion” who gets volunteered because they mentioned ChatGPT once.
What Actually Works
Successful AI integration requires senior transformation leadership. Someone who can:
- Look across the entire organisation and spot where AI genuinely helps
- Redesign processes from the ground up, not just automate broken ones
- Navigate politics and challenge assumptions
- Bring people along on the journey
- Say no to vanity projects and yes to uncomfortable changes
This person needs to bridge technology to business while sitting at the executive table, not reporting to someone, who reports to someone, who might get ten minutes with the CxO.
The Real Questions
Because here’s what successful AI integration actually requires:
Stop thinking about redundancies. If your primary goal is reducing headcount, you’re almost certainly going to fail. AI should amplify human capability, not focussed at replacing it wholesale.
Address ethics early. What data are you using? Who’s accountable when things go wrong? Without trust, adoption crumbles.
Be willing to start fresh. Don’t just automate existing processes. Ask: “If we were designing this from scratch today, knowing what AI can do, how would we build?”
The Bottom Line
The AI gold rush is real, and the pressure to keep up is intense. But the winners won’t be the ones who moved fastest.
They’ll be the ones who put the right leadership in place and thought hardest about what they were actually trying to achieve.
The question isn’t whether you should embrace AI. It’s whether you’re brave enough to do it properly.
by Craig Ashmole, Fractional CIO – Straightalking Consulting on October 2025
I've lived in the world of Corporate CIOs long enough to know: The biggest challenges are best solved together. That's why I'm sharing my blog as a forum where IT leaders share hard-won lessons and chart the path forward, post-pandemic, post-playbook, and ready for what's next as AI takes over the world.
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