Who on my team should own AI?
The T-shaped operator your people already trust, not your most technical person and not an outside hire. Look for the shape, not the title.
Look for a shape, not a title. The right owner is T-shaped: deep enough in one part of the work to be respected, broad enough to see across the whole company, and genuinely curious about what the tools can now do. They can spend about 20% of their week on this without dropping the job you already value them for. In practice that is often a chief of staff, a head of operations, or a respected program lead.
It helps to be clear about who it is not. It is not your most technical person by default, because the job is translation and trust, not engineering, and your best builder is often not your best persuader. It is not an outside hire, because the hardest part of the work is changing how respected colleagues do their jobs, and that trust does not transfer with a contract. And it is not simply your loudest AI enthusiast, because enthusiasm is not the same as the trust of the room, and this job runs entirely on that trust.
So the test is simple. Who already gets listened to, across functions, and would be curious enough to spend a fifth of their time here? That person is your owner. The full model for running it at your size is The Small-Team Operating Model, and the role it scales down from is the AI Product Partner.
Cheers,
-Titus
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