When something goes wrong with AI, the CISO gets put in front of a firing squad.
The board wants answers. The CEO wants accountability. And in the post-mortem, it emerges that the CISO didn't have the authority to prevent it in the first place.
This is already happening.
The technical layer is not the only bottleneck. The models work. The tools exist. People are already moving anyway — their own tools, their own accounts, their own workarounds. Shadow IT has never been more visible, or more consequential.
Every executive has the same conversation with their board right now: "What are we doing with AI?" So pilots get launched, initiatives get announced, and somewhere in the background the accountability lands on the CISO — whether or not they had the authority to shape any of it.
A recent MIT Sloan Management Review study found that 91% of large-company data leaders identified cultural challenges as the primary barrier to AI success. Only 9% pointed to technology.
As Paul Daugherty, former Chief Technology & Innovation Officer at Accenture, puts it in More Human (Hougaard & Carter, HBR Press, 2025):
"Success with AI demands more investment in people than in technology."
Yet most organisations continue to treat AI implementation as a technical problem and their leadership structures reflect exactly that assumption.
AI is as much a leadership challenge as a technical one. The pilots that stall don't fail because the technology is wrong. They fail because the people weren't brought along.
Transformation was announced. Not negotiated.
The leaders navigating this well have stopped asking "do we have the right AI?" and started asking "do we have the right relationships to make AI matter?"
That means thinking about the human beings in the mix. The team member who feels threatened. The stakeholder who wasn't consulted. The executive under board pressure who needs a partner, not a policy.
Start there. One conversation. One person who needs to feel heard before they'll move.
Authority is assigned. Influence is built. And in a landscape this volatile, influence is the only thing the org chart can't take away from you.
The lightbulb moment for most leaders is realising their job is less about solving technical challenges and more about navigating the people ones.
Curious about your level of influence? Take the Influence Curve quiz to find out where you are — and where you need to be given the challenges you face.
When you think about the leaders who've had the most impact on you — did they have authority, influence, or both?
Best regards, Brian