Running IBM's AI strategy with the Chief AI Officer
As chief of staff to IBM's Chief AI Officer, I was responsible for making a company-wide AI strategy operational: aligning executives across business units, measuring progress, and taking one clear story about trustworthy AI to market.
- Role
- Program Director, AI Strategy and Chief of Staff
- When
- 2021 – 2022
- Team
- Multidisciplinary individual contributors
Before
- Business units bringing separate trustworthy AI stories to clients and analysts
- No single view of which IBM products used AI
- An AI strategy many IBMers had not bought into
After
- One cross-IBM trustworthy AI approach, with sales teams activated and incentivized
- The first cross-business-unit view of IBM's AI-infused portfolio, used in internal and external reporting
- OKRs for the AI strategy, tracked in one system
The situation
IBM's Chief AI Officer was responsible for a unified AI strategy across a company organized by business unit. Strategy without a way to run it stays a slide. The office needed an operating system: goals people agreed on, a way to track them, and a way to bring products, research, sales and marketing together behind one message.
What I did
- Built the management system
I earned an OKR coach certification and led the leadership team through workshops to define measurable outcomes, then set up tracking so progress on strategic initiatives was visible and reported regularly.
- Aligned executives on one trustworthy AI go-to-market
The hardest part was getting executives from different business units to agree on a single approach. I used design thinking methods and kept every conversation in the open, with no side meetings. The group reached an answer quickly and the business rallied around it.
- Curated IBM's AI-infused portfolio
I assembled the first cross-business-unit view of IBM products that use AI, and worked with analyst relations to take that story to the market.
- Won over IBMers
Buy-in from employees was one of the biggest barriers. I ran a monthly newsletter and ask-me-anything sessions with the Chief AI Officer, owned an AI Skills Academy course, and delivered the highest-rated session in the AI Master Class series.
- Ran the office
I freed the Chief AI Officer to spend time with clients, analysts and media by handling senior stakeholder meetings, budget, expense approvals, hiring and a team of individual contributors.
What changed
The trustworthy AI approach became one of the key sales plays IBM took to market that year. I also wrote about the foundations of trustworthy AI for the IBM Watson blog, and co-founded GROW AI to help women leading AI work at IBM build their visibility.