If you're running an AI programme that feels like it's drifting, the issue might not be tooling or budget. It could be mandate, the gap between what leadership says about AI and what they're willing to back. Three common versions of this come up, all of them fixable. Here's something that just might solve your problem.
The first is performative. The CEO mentions AI in the all-hands, there's a Slack channel, someone's job title gets "AI" added to it, but the operating model doesn't really shift. Six months in, the energy has usually gone, and nobody's quite sure where it went.
The second is delegated. Leadership cares in principle, but hands the whole programme to one person and expects them to come back with a plan. That person is often the most thoughtful one in the room, but ends up trying to drive cross-functional change without the authority to make it happen. When the plan dies in committee, it isn't really their fault. It's a structural problem dressed up as an individual one.
The third is mixed-signal. AI is meant to deliver cost savings, or new revenue, or sometimes both. The team building the roadmap ends up being asked to optimise for one outcome on Monday and another on Friday, which means progress is genuinely hard to find.
All of these are fixable. The patterns repeat because the levers tend to be similar: a named executive sponsor, a budget that survives the next quarter's cost review, a clear answer to "why are we doing this and what does success look like by date X," and a willingness to change something visible within 90 days. When those four are in place, the work tends to stick. When they aren't, it tends to drift, regardless of how good the strategy looks on paper.
If you're the one running an AI programme without those things in place, a useful thing you can do this week is to surface the gap as a working document rather than a complaint. Name the executive sponsor the work needs, estimate the budget it actually requires, write the success criteria you'd want leadership to set, and hand it back up. Leadership are busy, and setting clear expectations on something this new is genuinely hard. Helping them get to a tight scope with sharp objectives is valuable work.
Mandate is one of the five dimensions the diagnostic covers. It works alongside Process, People, Infrastructure, and Governance.