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What It Takes to Lead When AI Moves Faster Than the Organisation
- Artificial intelligence is not a new domain. According to data gathered from the 2025 DataIQ 100, AI has a high degree of correlation with machine learning, a mature discipline within most data functions, and even more closely with generative AI (GenAI).
- Yet the way these two branches of the same tree have grown inside organisations is not the same. Machine learning’s rise was deliberate, designed to deliver results in a controlled way.
- GenAI, by contrast, shot up almost overnight. Its large foundational models captured attention instantly and spread faster than the technical and organisational roots could stabilise.
- Overnight, AI moved from a specialist function to a board-level priority. It became a headline driver, source of investor pressure, and a strategic question for every business unit. Leaders want to know what it can deliver now.
- Teams with direct access to tools are experimenting, often without consultation or coordination. Regulators are sharpening their expectations around control and accountability.
- For data and AI leaders building the AI-first organisation, the challenge is less technical and more managerial. It gets harder not because the models get smarter, but because the organisation is rarely ready for the acceleration.
- That is why pressure became the keyword at Guild 2025. It’s everywhere, but it doesn’t look the same. Some leaders face high expectations without the authority to act. Others have strong sponsorship but are now confronting system-wide change. Many find themselves scaling fast but struggling to hold alignment as demand outpaces structure.
- In most cases, the Chief Data Officer title stays the same, but the work has significantly evolved: towards business strategy, judged on value, and leading across people, culture, technology, governance, and innovation.
- This report is about that shift. It maps three distinct leadership modes observed across Guild contributors—Orientation, Scaling, and North Star—and explores how each reflects a different response to the pressures triggered by GenAI, and to what’s coming next.
- Because while GenAI has opened the floodgates, Agentic AI is already gathering offshore. For now, there’s no final blueprint: only the challenge of leading forward through conditions that remain unclear and unfinished.
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