Introduction The AI Race Has a Leadership Problem Nobody Is Talking About The meeting had been going for forty minutes. The CEO was asking a simple question — "What does our AI strategy actually look like across the business?" — and the room had gone quiet in that particular way rooms go quiet when nobody wants to be the first to admit they don't have a clean answer. The CTO spoke about infrastructure. The CDO spoke about data pipelines. The head of digital spoke about three

Not long ago, companies had the luxury of time. If something went wrong with their systems, their data, or even their people, they could say, “Let’s audit this next quarter.” A few meetings, a long report, some damage control… and life moved on. That world is gone. In 2026, everything moves fast — especially problems powered by AI. A biased hiring tool can reject hundreds of candidates in one afternoon. An automated loan system can quietly block an entire neighborhood before