One Question for Your Monday: Who Owns It, By Name?
If an AI rollout is running in your organization right now, here is the question worth asking before your first meeting today:
Who, by name, is responsible for this changing how work gets done?
Three answers come back, and each one tells you something different.
“IT deployed it.” You have availability, not adoption. IT can make a tool exist for everyone in the building. IT cannot change how the operations team assembles its Friday report, because IT doesn’t own that workflow and shouldn’t be expected to.
“Everyone, really.” You have a subscription with a communications plan. Shared responsibility for a change means nobody’s calendar has a line item for it, and nobody’s performance conversation includes it.
A specific name. Good. Now ask the follow-up, because it’s the half that gets skipped: can that person retire the old way of doing things? An owner who can introduce the new step but can’t remove the old one is set up to fail, because the pilot runs as a parallel option, and parallel options lose under deadline pressure every time.
Ownership without both halves is sponsorship wearing a badge.
The reason this question works as a diagnostic is that it’s answerable in about four seconds, and the answer predicts the outcome better than the tool selection did. I’ve written at more length about buying a tool when the job was changing a workflow and what an ambiguous one actually costs, but the short version fits in a Monday.
If you couldn’t answer it just now, that’s not a failure. It’s the cheapest possible time to find out.
If yours needs answering out loud, that’s the first conversation.
Rosemarie Withee has spent thirteen years helping operations teams get real work out of their software, first Microsoft 365, now AI. She’s written six books for Wiley and builds AI products at Portal Integrators.