Why AI Strategy Belongs in the President’s Workplace
The most unsafe words in higher education right now are “we have a committee dealing with AI.” It’s a pattern playing out throughout schools with amazing consistency, one that tends to unfold in the very same predictable series. A president recognizes that AI is no longer optional. Feeling the urgency but unpredictable of the path, they convene a task force, appoint a committee, and hand the initiative to HR, a freshly minted innovation team, or a willing provost. Then, having checked the box, they carry on.
6 months later, the consequences of that handoff become noticeable not as a single failure, however as a peaceful fragmentation. One department is running a chatbot for recommending. Another purchased a productivity tool that IT didn’t know existed up until after the agreement was signed. A 3rd prepared an AI policy that bears little similarity to what professors are actually doing in the class. Everyone is busy, and everyone thinks somebody else is steering. Nobody is collaborating, and the institution, as an entire, has stagnated an inch in any coherent instructions.
This is a management failure, and it is occurring at scale, silently and simultaneously, at institutions that consider themselves forward-thinking. Educause’s 2025 AI Landscape Study found that 57% of organizations now consider AI a tactical concern, which sounds like progress till you read the next number. Just 22% have an institution-wide technique to reveal for it. Of those, majority are handling adoption on an ad hoc basis across disconnected departments, basically improvising at scale. The institutions that are in fact closing that gap share something in common, and it is not a better committee, a larger budget plan, or a more advanced innovation stack. It is a president who never handed off the wheel.
AI Is a Modification Management Juggernaut First
The instinct to deal with AI as a technology problem is reasonable. Innovation shows up. It has suppliers, demos, and price tags. But the factor the majority of school AI efforts falter has nothing to do with the tools and whatever to do with who owns the change.
AI touches labor force functions, academic integrity, curriculum style, student services, data governance, and budget plan allowance simultaneously. Taken together, that scope describes an institution-wide improvement, and no provost, CIO, or HR director has the cross-functional authority to lead one. Only the president does.
In my experience working across numerous institutions, the pattern holds consistently across every major organizational change. When the chief executive leads from the front, change sticks. When they hand it off, it stalls. AI requires the something only a president can supply, which is an institutional mandate with real resource authority connected.
What Delegation Really Produces
When AI method is sent down the leadership ladder, foreseeable things take place. Departments purchase point services without business coordination. Shadow systems emerge. Professors and personnel get conflicting guidance. Trainees experience inconsistency throughout the organization.
Educause also found that 34% of teachers believe their executive leaders are ignoring the expense of AI adoption, and only 2% report that brand-new funding sources have actually been recognized for AI projects. Underestimated expenses plus no new resources is a setup for stalled momentum. It informs you that the monetary and strategic architecture of AI hasn’t been declared by the people who control institutional capital. That is a presidential-level problem.