AI by Department
Every department head owns AI for their area, and nobody owns how it fits together.
The lines under "How it sounds" are typical phrasing we wrote, not quotes from clients or interviews.
How it sounds
- “Each of our department heads is responsible for AI in their area.”
- “Sales is trying a tool someone heard about on a podcast.”
- “Finance ran a survey, and ops is comparing three tools.”
What it looks like
Each department head owns AI for their own area. They run meetings, send surveys and compare tools, and each team builds its own habits. Because the heads are busy, the plan follows whatever they tried last or heard about on the drive in. There's no thread between departments, and no continuity unless one head happens to be deeply interested.
Why it happens
It feels like the natural split. Department heads know their own work best, and giving each one AI for their area avoids naming one owner over everyone. But each head carries AI as a Second Job, so it gets the time left over, and recent ideas win because there's no time to weigh them against a plan. See The Noise Problem. This is the department heads setup. Recency as the driver is our reasoning. We didn't find a study that measures it for AI decisions.
What it costs
- Siloed work. SAS and IDC found 44.9% of small and mid-sized companies say successful pilots "remain siloed and are not reused elsewhere," and 44.8% had "no structured view of their AI use cases, with activities remaining fragmented across teams and functions."
- Time. Each head carries the switching cost in AI as a Second Job, so a company with five heads pays it five times. That's our reasoning from the Mark, Gonzalez and Harris figures, not a measured result.
- The cost of departments solving the same problem different ways is our reasoning. We haven't found a study that measures it for AI.
First move
Ask each department head for their top three AI uses and the tools behind them, and put the lists side by side. Then name one owner for how they fit together, with the department heads as partners.
The fifteen patterns, with what each one costs and a first move, are in The AI anti-pattern field guide.
Related AI patterns
- AI Left to Emerge. No decisions made on purpose, so whatever grows in the dark is what you get.
- AI as a Second Job. The person who got AI still has a day job.
- The Noise Problem. So many people selling AI answers that it's hard to tell good help from bad.
Someone should own AI at your company.
An AI strategy decides who owns the work, which tools stay, and what changes first.