Operating AI

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Why AI Adoption Stalls Without an Operating Capability

Most of the organisations I work with do not have an AI adoption problem. They have an AI operating problem. Pilots are everywhere; production is rare. CIO.com reported in 2025 that 88% of AI pilots never reach production, and MIT’s “State of AI in Business 2025” report put custom enterprise AI reaching production at just 5%. Operating AI is the discipline this briefing gathers: designing, launching, and evolving the AI Centre of Excellence, the organisational capability that turns scattered experiments into scaled, governed adoption.

The mistake I see most often is Boards treating the AI CoE as a successor to the Cloud Centre of Excellence and filing it under IT. Cloud was an infrastructure evolution led by technologists. AI is business-led and arrives everywhere at once: marketing may be transforming customer engagement while finance is still observing, and the systems in between are making millions of decisions at a tempo no quarterly review can oversee. In that multi-speed reality, one-size-fits-all governance becomes either a stranglehold or a sieve.

The position these articles take is that the AI CoE belongs alongside the Board, reporting through the risk committee, with a mandate to act as both enabler and guardian. Its work is defined by 18 functions organised around the Five Pillars diagnostic, applied with an intensity graduated to each function’s stage in the AI Stages of Adoption model. The governing principle is the Minimum Lovable Governance principle: just enough structure to make governed AI faster than ungoverned AI, so that shadow experiments surface rather than spread.

Read this briefing and you should come away able to make three judgements: whether your organisation’s governance structure matches its multi-speed reality, where an AI CoE should sit and report, and what its first 90 days must deliver. Those are decisions for the Board rather than for IT, and in my view they are not decisions to defer.

Then read this

Read the Core as a Build Sequence

The core of this briefing is a series I wrote as one continuous argument, and the articles are numbered in the order I would still read them. The first two establish the mandate: why AI’s decision velocity and multi-speed adoption demand Board-level governance, and the 18 functions an effective AI CoE performs. If you read nothing else, read those two before your next risk committee meeting.

The design work comes next. Mapping your multi-speed reality shows how to assess where each function actually sits rather than where the executive summary says it sits, the structure article sets out the hub-and-spoke model and the roles that staff it, and the capabilities article turns the Five Pillars into a build plan.

The operating work closes the sequence: a 90-day launch built on systematic pilot selection, the shift from project to platform thinking that scaling demands, and the continuous evolution that keeps the capability relevant as the technology moves.

The further reading goes wider and earlier. The Board-placement argument starts in The Future of AI Expertise, from January 2025, and the shadow AI article that followed is the first full treatment of the CoE itself; the core series builds both out. The Complete AI Adoption Framework piece, the 2025 precursor to Remake, shows how the three mechanisms integrate, and the AI Stages of Adoption primers are the place to begin if the vocabulary is new to you. The piece on MIT’s 2025 findings is the external validation: the evidence that the operating problem is the norm rather than the exception. The later pieces carry the thinking into practice: the case for an AI amnesty as the CoE’s first governance move, the day-one blueprint for operationalising what the amnesty surfaces, and the Minimum Lovable Governance principle that keeps the CoE’s governance proportionate to the risk it oversees.

Once you have the shape of the argument, Remake holds the named mechanisms the series draws on, and the questions carry the short answers I give when Boards ask where to start. The point is not to finish the briefing in one sitting but to leave it with a structure you can put in front of your Board.