For all the investment flowing into artificial intelligence, many organisations still struggle to articulate what they want it to do. That gap between commitment and clarity is where spending runs ahead of strategy. For many leadership teams, the hard questions about ownership, governance and strategic fit remain stubbornly unresolved.  

 

At Criticaleye's recent CEO Retreat, held in partnership with AlixPartners, CrowdStrike and Hitachi Solutions, those questions sat at the centre of nearly every conversation about technology. 

 

Adele Ara, Chief Technology Officer at Lightsource bp, said: “If we apply AI for the sole purpose of making existing processes faster, cheaper or more automated, we are missing the value proposition. 

 

“AI is no more than another enabling technology to deliver whatever the business ambitions are. When we begin by defining organisational purpose and how AI can serve it, then we're not looking at processes anymore. What we are looking at is skills and capabilities.”   

 

There is also the not insignificant matter of ambition. Stefan Kulik, Chief Operating Officer at Helfie.AI — a mobile health platform using AI to screen for conditions ranging from respiratory illness to cardiovascular disease — said: "Whether you're buying AI for something that is truly transformative, or whether you're buying… improved business process — you need to know that these things you can stand by, that they're not going to fail and that you can isolate what is for improvement versus that which is for true, profound reinvention or transformation." 

 

Simon Drake, EVP & UK General Manager at Hitachi Solutions, has seen what happens when that clarity is absent. New technologies arriving at pace, he suggested, expose misalignment that already exists at the top. "As a CEO, you may have a growth agenda, but if your CIO has a technical debt refresh agenda and those aren't tightly linked, you're going to diverge pretty quickly," he explained.  

 

Speed, though, brings its own challenge. As Simon put it, "things that took days now take seconds". And with that comes a more uncomfortable question about human judgement. "How do we give people the judgement to review things appropriately?" he asked. "But also, if they're constantly just in dialogue with machinery, how do we double down on their interpersonal skills, their ability to deal with their colleagues and their clients and their partners?" 

 

That responsibility takes on a different weight when the technology is screening millions of people for serious health conditions, like at Helfie.AI. "It is vital to make sure you have a proper code of ethics around AI… [W]hy you build it [and] how you build it to interface with the human being… [and] what you do with the data you create,"  Stefan said. "Operating at scale, particularly with people, nations or organisations, mandates that this cannot be an afterthought." 

 

Getting the basics right 

 

When delegates at the Retreat were asked whether AI would radically transform their business model, nearly three quarters said it would — to some extent or a great extent. Only two percent said not at all. "The belief is there," said Matthew Blagg, CEO of Criticaleye. "The conviction that this matters is real. What is still missing, for many organisations, is the clarity about what transformation actually means for them specifically." 

 

That gap, Matthew suggested, is what Criticaleye is hearing repeatedly across its Community. "The pressure on leaders to move is enormous — from Boards, from investors, from competitors. But pressure without direction is just noise. The organisations that will come out of this well are the ones that have been honest with themselves about what they are actually ready to do." 

 

The organisations that will get this right are not simply the ones that have moved first. Rather, they will have leadership teams that understand where they’re moving to and want to unlock value to get there faster.  

Bridgette Hall, Senior Editor, Criticaleye