Challenge

Executive management had agreed on an IT strategy that includes anchoring AI strategically and organizationally in the company — the organization was to be actively led into the AI era rather than sitting it out. The decisive question: how do you truly bring AI into an organization — not as an IT project, but as a matter for the business departments that will work with it?

Approach

The answer is a cross-departmental AI working group: people from a wide range of business departments — deliberately no IT people — meet regularly to implement the agreed strategy together. My role: facilitation, enabling, and AI consulting — making the group capable of working, providing subject-matter guidance, and structuring the process.

The working group:

  • is the first point of contact for AI topics across the entire company — for all employees,
  • collects and prioritizes use cases from the business departments and implements them — the final decision on direction is aligned with the departments and executive management,
  • builds capability — members actively pursue further training, engage with AI, and learn together,
  • tries out new tools and brings them into the company,
  • clarifies legal questions around the use of AI,
  • and carries the topic back into their departments as multipliers.

Outcome

The working group has been running for over a year — what started as a strategic mandate from executive management has become a lasting, self-sustaining process: use cases are identified and implemented from within the business departments, and the engagement with AI — professionally and legally — is anchored in the organization rather than delegated to IT.