In this episode, Stephen Coia, Managing Director of VKY, takes the reins to explore the contentious topic of AI ownership within enterprises.
With insights from industry experts, Vasili Triant, CEO of UJET, Dom Steel, CFO of Avocado55 and as usual Matt Baron.
We delve into the shifting dynamics of who should drive AI initiatives and the strategic implications for organisations.
Episode Transcript: Who Owns AI in the Enterprise?
Host: Stephen Coia, Managing Director of VKY
Panelists: Vasili Triant, Matt Baron, Dominic Steel
Podcast: True North Podcast
Stephen Coia:
Hi everyone, Stephen Coia here from VKY. Thanks for joining another episode of the True North podcast. As you’ll see, I’ve stepped in today or perhaps hijacked Matt’s seat for this episode. Thanks, Matt.
Today’s episode, we’re going to talk about a fairly controversial topic. This whole area of who owns AI within an enterprise organisation. It’s obviously going to be a bit feisty. So let’s start with Vasili. Clearly, Vasili, you’ve had lots of conversations, lots of different levels of organisation. I would imagine there’s maybe a bit of a bun fight when it comes to who’s actually going to own AI and make it all happen.
Vasili:
Yeah, I think that we’re starting to see it play out a little bit. It’s, you know, been running around for 2 years bouncing between different owners, but I think it’s settling in that, you know, IT and the tech part of the organisation has to own the AI technology from, you know, a compliance, security, trust perspective. Ultimately, you got to be, you know, somewhat cautious because the cost can run out of control, and there’s a lot of ability for people to choose things on their own—like you can just go sign up individual accounts, and you have to find some controls there.
However, when we’re thinking about AI, when it comes to a specific vertical, whether it’s customer experience or some other operational process, the business owners within those segments want to own it as well. And I think traditionally, that over the last let’s say 10 to 12 years, the vertical within the business has owned the technology for that segment, not IT. Right? That’s a shift that happened as cloud and SaaS models came about.
Stephen Coia:
So, yeah, that makes sense. I’m guessing that a lot of people must get, you know, really excited at the opportunity. Almost see it as like a career development: “I’m going to be the guy that owns AI in this organisation.” And, you know, it’s probably in some cases that works. In other cases, I’m guessing it’s maybe sometimes the wrong fit.
Vasili:
Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of choices out there, right? And right now, if you want to make sure that you’re staying ahead of things, you also want to make an impact on the business. You know, right now AI is kind of the hot thing to tie yourself to.
At the same time, every two to three weeks the models, the technology is shifting, right? I mean, what used to be something from OpenAI then became Google, then shifted to, you know, DeepSeek, and now it’s, you know, Anthropic or Claude. And now you also have the open-source models that are coming about, you know, the Chinese kind of open-source models. Everybody wants to kind of stay on the forefront, and so people are kind of jumping around to make decisions to also stay on the forefront.
You know, what used to be a “Hey, let’s use OpenAI ChatGPT” now is “Let’s use Claude.” And someone has to keep some controls on it and make sure that you’re focused on what are the outcomes or the opportunities that you’re trying to inflect in the business.
Stephen Coia:
Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. But you must have seen a lot of this back in your days in the dark Yorkshire coal mines. You know, I’m thinking about these enterprises, but we had—used to be like some guy pencil-owning operations.
Matt:
Absolutely. Well, we obviously—it was chalk and slate! But the bit that I think is quite interesting is who the organisation assigns to own the strategy then determines the strategy and determines how they approach actually sourcing the capability, the tech.
So we were, you know, kind of—we’ve been challenged by several clients recently when we’ve been talking to them about what their service strategy should be: want to build it, or bespoke it, or to bring an agency in to build it.
So we’ve had conversations over the last kind of, I’m going to say 14 to 15 months ago: “We’re building it. We’re doing it ourselves. We’re doing, you know, but out. We’ll speak to you.” We’re now having conversations over the last couple of months with companies that started to build it themselves and are seeing such speed of progress with the major players that they’ve stopped programmes. So, they’ve wasted money building programmes.
Two specific companies that we’ve spoken to: return on investment that Dom’s trying to calculate and work through, and what the financial benefits are and the overall benefits are, just smashed because they’ve spent six figures—a lot of six-figure numbers in there—and actually what they should have done is they should have bought it. So decision on buy, bespoke, or build, yeah, should be buy in our view.
But we know there’s a lot of tech companies or tech-focused companies around. I did a podcast with Ian Cairns from JustEat recently, and Ian’s passionate about building it. Yeah. But what we’re seeing is that internal capability cannot keep up with external capability, and you end up in such a gap that you should be… So from a strategic perspective, determining that buy, bespoke, or build often comes down to the person who’s given the ownership. So a lot of companies unfortunately make the wrong decision.
Yeah. Obviously, we think the right decision is to buy, right? To actually implement it. But I mean, we’d all say that, wouldn’t we, right? Because… yeah, it’s interesting.
Stephen Coia:
I mean, you must see a lot of that, Dom. You know, suppose does it maybe depend on where the conversation started or who started the conversation about let’s get going with AI? So must—is it maybe started as a tech play, but then you’ve now got organisations that are realising actually if we don’t join up the operation with the tech, it’s so…
Dom:
So here’s my first thought on this is that actually this is a new role, right? This isn’t a tech-led decision. This isn’t a service-led decision. Let me back that up.
Service organisations used to just own the people. And then certain technology teams or even product designers would say, “Well, we can build some self-service features that sit at the front of those journeys.” And they weren’t really owned by the service organisation. The service organisation just said, “Can you save me some contacts?” And the tech solution was, “We’ll put some self-service options in front of it.” But nobody was actually owning the journey that the customer was going to go on in a sort of holistic manner.
Service organisations owned the people end, and the IT organisation and the self-service end. AI kind of sits in between those two things. And if you’re going to do AI properly, you need to find somebody that’s going to own the journeys. Yeah. Architect the journeys. Technology people can provide the tools to help manage those journeys, and the service organisation actually becomes responsible for experience.
Yeah. But there’s a sort of architect that sits in the middle that says, “This is how we’re going to have these journeys flow through.” Now as a numbers guy, that makes perfect sense to me because now I can forecast my business based on journeys and how many orders go through. What’s the cancellation rate? I know how many journeys I’m going to architect. I can build the digital twin of my business for the future if I had somebody that actually architected what the journeys were going to be and designed those.
It’s a new set of KPIs then that operates. What’s the—am I getting the right number of cancellations per order or is that trending in the wrong direction? If so, why? Yeah. Um, and I—I mean, I’ve been dying to say this for a while—Spiral. This light, this absolutely amazing product is the thing that would change the game for me as that numbers person, that sort of journey architect, to actually see what is going on, what customers are actually talking to you about to help design those better experiences.
Stephen Coia:
Yeah. No, I agree. I sat in a demo that Dom you ran focused on Spiral a few weeks ago and looked awesome. I think it would be—I said, could you bring life to some real-life examples of like how people are actually making, you know, business-led decisions using products like that? I would be just interested to hear a bit more about that.
Vasili:
Yeah. So, I think there’s kind of like two pieces, and I want to pick up—I agree with you, Dom, on it being a new role. I think the role is sitting, though, within that operational part of the organisation. So, whoever owned, let’s just say, contact centre customer experience… but they’re creating a new role.
You made me think about—I was just meeting with one of our customers on Monday and they’ve appointed a manager of that kind of AI transformation. So someone who owns like, how are we going to use the technology and how are we going to apply it?
So kind of going into like, how are we using some of those tools or how are some customers using those tools… What’s interesting is like, we had no prescription around how we ingest the data and let AI kind of connect the dots, because what it is essentially is we can ingest all kinds of data points. But then it’s up to that user within the business to prompt and essentially query like anything you want—just like if you went onto Google and said, “What is the best, you know, handheld GPS or phone or something for my car because I want to film people or something like that?”—and it would go off and correlate a lot of data points.
Someone has to prompt it, you know, that person with that AI transformation. And what we’re seeing is that people are coming up with some really interesting questions. Things that are not the traditional “What is my FCR?”, “What is my average handle time?”, but it’s more like:
- “What are my top 10 reasons people are contacting me?”
- “What are the five things that we could do in our business to avoid those negative experiences?”
So it’s actually a little bit different. Instead of saying, “How could we avoid people contacting us about those top 10 reasons?”—which would be deflection, right, you’re trying to push the customers away from you—“What could we do to improve the experience that would then get the customers to not contact us?”
And we’re starting to see that. And really from customers’ feedback to us, that they’re coming up with, “Oh my gosh, did you realise we could do this?” And we’re like, “No, we didn’t!” But it makes sense because the data is there, and the AI agents are essentially correlating the data based on the queries.
Stephen Coia:
So it’s interesting, you know, when I just listen to those questions that you’re saying people are asking, it does, you know, sound like C-suite type questions, you know, that you’re going to get from—either you’re in a role answerable to a leadership team or a board and you’re being asked those questions, or those are actually the questions coming from the senior leaders of the business themselves. So is that maybe a shift, Matt, do you think? Like you’re seeing more of that level of interest?
Matt:
Yes. So, but I suppose I should put more on the answer than that.
I like that. Just maybe stop!
I know I talk too much! Anyway, the—over the last 12 months, I would say, yeah, we have—we’ve spoken to so many different roles in organisations that are looking to either investigate or take seriously the implementation of some type of AI capability in their service organisation, their contact centre, however it’s structured, multiple sectors.
Now, what we’re seeing is a lot of lag, a lot of—I mean, you know, we speak to you, in another couple of weeks, ghosted, not spoken to, come back to you: “We need to talk again.” So it’s this—it’s a struggle with BAU. So the people who are running the BAU operations are really struggling to actually find that focus.
And I’ve been in that role, and I get it, right? You’ve got operational pressures, peaks hit you, whatever happens, struggle, lots of teams off, illness, whatever, and you’re having to focus on running the business.
Now, the best conversations we’re having currently our way are when someone who will be the beneficiary of the implementation has stimulated a sponsor at board, so a C-suite, okay? And they’re the best conversations because they’re outcome-driven conversations: “This is the change within your business or the opportunity within your business. This is how you could grow, this is how you could optimise.”
So I think once someone at C-suite sits there and goes, “AI isn’t going away, right? No one can hide from it. It is going to be part of our lives. It’s becoming part of our lives now.” And once they take that seriously and get some external advice, then we—you know, and we can support people to take that pragmatic step to understanding what the strategy should be and then obviously make recommendation as to what the next steps are. So I would—it is when someone in C-suite takes proper sponsor responsibility for it.
Stephen Coia:
Yeah. Yeah. And I suppose nobody likes to be the one that gets things wrong. So, you know, I think we’ve talked about how on face value it can be a really exciting, interesting area to get into. But I’m guessing some people might be afraid of going, “Well, actually, I’ve managed to get to this level in organisation, I really don’t want to be the one that gets it wrong with AI.” And like there’s a bit of fear factor in that. So how can you maybe…
Dom:
Have you read Who Moved My Cheese? Sorry, have you read Who Moved My Cheese?
Stephen:
Yes. Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Dom:
How many times have we revisited that in the last six months?
Matt:
Yeah, I mean, I actually started listening to the book again on audio—on Audible the other day, right? Because it was just so true. Something that was written 30 years ago or something like that.
Stephen Coia:
Worth bringing to life actually… cause not everyone watching will have read Who Moved My Cheese?
Matt:
It’s that—I think the synopsis of it is that you should look at change in a positive way, right? That change can be a positive, and there’s too much worrying about “What’s the impact on me?” And you actually—in my simple terms of kind of looking at the, you know, revisiting the book, it’s swapping your mindset to understand what the benefit of change can be to you, because it should happen.
Right. And that’s the key bit. We kind of smiled at each other then because, honestly, a lot of the conversations are, “Chat, chat, brilliant, this is amazing!” And then suddenly you see the realisation on someone’s face about what the impact is.
I mean, Vasili’s been saying that, you know, a lot of organisations he’s working with aren’t reducing headcount when they possibly could. But actually interactions are going up because it’s easier for customers and everything. Yeah.
But what we feel the underlying—because we’re obviously business implementation people, not tech implementation people—but we see the fact that you don’t have the skills and capability or the resource available to actually execute the change to implement the… AI changes your business model, fact, right? So you should transform to a different business model, different operating model, and organisations aren’t doing that.
But if it allows you to free up resource, then you need to know what to do with that resource. Now, a lot of organisations say they want to save. What we’re encouraging people is to grow—to utilise that brilliant resource that they’re freeing up to actually help grow the business, bring in extra revenue primarily.
Stephen Coia:
Yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, I’m not hearing much focus on tech in these answers. So I guess it’s interesting that we’re maybe evidencing that a lot of the decision-makers or the ownership perhaps has to be centred around the business. But clearly, if you get the technology wrong, then that’s going to be a problem as well.
So, you know, how do you… If I’m a leader of an organisation—I never have been, by the way—but if I’m a leader of an organisation and I’m focused on trying to make the right decision here, how do I… technology decision? Yeah. Yeah.
So my fear of AI is probably going to be like I choose the wrong option, and I get locked into something, and yeah, I get sacked because I’ve got it wrong, being brutal! Got some scars on my back! So, you know, how do you deal with that kind of technology call as well? Because, you know, you’ve got guys like Avocado that can obviously come in and get the business change right, but how do you make sure that they’re getting the technology?
Vasili:
Well, I think that one is using a partner. I think services partners are becoming more and more important to understand, “Okay, let’s first start with what is your goal? What is the outcome that you want within your business?” And then letting someone that sees a lot of technologies at the same time come in and then map out like, “Okay, we’re going to design what your business process should be, and then we’re going to see how technology applies to it.”
And this is like an age-old problem in general. Like, people end up buying technology and then creating processes around the technology limitations. That is what’s happening out there right now, because there are point-solution vendors who have built a specific technology that are going and selling it like crazy to organisations and then saying, “Now I need to figure out how to stick it together.” Yeah. Right.
So I met with one of my customers on Monday, and they were basically telling me, “Hey, we’ve chosen this, and we need to figure out how to stick it together with you.” And I said, “What is the outcome that you’re looking to get?”
“Well, we want to stick it together with you, Jet.”
And I’m like, “Well, but we still didn’t answer the question. What is the outcome you want as a business?”
Now at the end of the day, I said, “Listen, here’s what I’m worried about, is you’re not focused on the outcome. You’re just focused on sticking the technologies together,” which is what I would say 95% of organisations do.
But you do need someone—and even though I’m with a vendor, it’s probably like a little bit hard for me to say—but you need someone like an Avocado 55 who can look across a lot of technologies, and maybe we’re not going to be a part of that mix, but the business will get the right outcome.
Now, the good thing is when you look at AI and you say, “What if I choose the wrong thing?”, AI is not really sticky. Like, I’ll just be candid: you can unplug one AI and plug in another AI. Pretty darn simple. It’s not a CCaaS decision. It’s not an infrastructure decision. It’s not a CCaaS decision.
I mean, even within our own business, we’ve used, I don’t know, maybe five different coding tools over the last 18 months. And the ability to move from a Codex to a Windsurf, to a, you know, Gemini, to a Co-pilot, to now, you know, Fable with Anthropic, has not been like that hard. So if you choose the wrong AI engine powering your conversational AI or your agent assist, you can unplug it and plug something in relatively easy.
So that’s both the opportunity and also the problem—is you also don’t want to be in a position where you’re unplugging, plugging, plugging. You need to build that architecture, and you need someone that understands your business. And frankly, the vendors aren’t going to understand your business enough because they’re bouncing from one place to another.
Stephen Coia:
Yeah. Yeah. It just all makes, you know—that makes total sense. It makes you think getting the right person to own this is just so important. So I suppose maybe just to wrap up, guys, you know, just going around… So, Matt, put on the spot: short answer. What do you think the characteristics of that perhaps leader of the future are? Are they there right now? What should they look like? What should their background be?
Matt:
The best conversations we’ve had recently are people with the title Chief Commercial Officer.
Stephen Coia:
Okay. Is that short enough? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Matt:
So that overarching responsibility for customer sitting under it. So outcome. Yeah. And the right position at board to be working with the CFO to understand the benefits to that, to then work with the IT Director or whatever the title would be to actually make the right decision.
But what you’ve got is someone then gluing the whole thing together. But it’s very outcome-focused. But because they’ve got commercial in their head, they want to get value out of it.
So an interesting point is instead of doing proof of concepts with AI or with tools, which is obviously the standard approach, right, for any level of transformation—do proof of value, right? Do proof of what it’s actually going to bring your business. Not that it works with your tech, but what it’s actually going to deliver for your business.
And that’s why I think CCOs sit very cleanly—Chief Commercial Officers. Obviously, you have Chief Customer Officer as well, but CCO, Chief Commercial, is one that we’ve had best traction with at the moment.
Stephen Coia:
Yeah, that sounds good. Awesome. Well, listen, thanks guys for joining us today. Thanks for everyone who’s been watching. Please follow us on LinkedIn. We look forward to catching you again.
