Danny Gardner

Spoke to someone leading AI enablement at a massive retailer. The #1 problem they’re running into: AI transformation is owned by IT and all initiatives must run through their AI Center of Excellence. This is causing two parallel issues: 1) Employees outside of IT aren’t given the tooling/infra needed to automate anything beyond simple workflows/use cases (read: citizen developer SDLC) 2) Rolling out AI is bottlenecked by ITs ability to own and approve every initiative This challenge is incredibly common across enterprises & you can quickly appreciate why… On one hand, you can empathize with IT. They’re not incentivized to take risks & embrace disruption, so the risk-return of decentralizing AI implementation cross-org is not obvious. On the other hand, an enterprise’s ability to metabolize raw intelligence is metered by its corporate SDLC. IT is often the bottleneck in that SDLC and it’s not hyperbolic to say that poses existential risk for the enterprise.