AI Is Not an IT Project. It Is a Leadership Decision.

Insights by Markko Vaarnas, Chairman of the Board, Forward Forever

I have been an advisor for Forward Forever for about two years, and the past year as Chairman of the Board. In my early career, I spent nearly 20 years building and scaling a company from the ground up before selling it in 2014. Since then I have worked as a board professional, consultant and angel investor across a range of companies.

That background, across industries, company sizes and boardrooms, shapes how I think about what is happening with AI right now.

The hardest part is that you cannot see what is coming

If there is one thing the past year has taught me, it is that predicting the next move in AI is close to impossible. Every few months something fundamentally new arrives: a new model, a new capability, a different way of working. By the time you have assessed one shift, another has already happened.

The pace is not just fast, it is genuinely disorienting. Something that looks like the right investment today might be outdated in six months. I notice this in my investor role as well: it is very hard to pick winners when the rules keep changing and the finish line keeps moving.

AI helps with decisions, but it also creates new confusion

There is no question that AI has become a useful tool for decision support. Things that used to take weeks, like market research or synthesising large amounts of information, can now be done in hours with the right approach. That is real leverage.

At the same time I have started noticing something in boardrooms and leadership teams: someone puts a question into an AI tool and presents the output as fact. The result still needs to be treated critically. AI is not always right, and knowing when to trust it and when to verify it is a skill most organisations are still developing.

Three levels of AI adoption, and most organisations are stuck at the first

Looking at how companies actually use AI today, I see three distinct levels, and the gap between them is large.

At the individual level, people are experimenting on their own. A developer builds a small tool over the weekend, a salesperson uses Copilot to draft proposals. This is valuable, but it is also fragile: uncontrolled, inconsistent and often invisible to leadership.

At the process level, AI gets embedded into actual business workflows: sales, marketing, customer service, operations. This requires someone close to each function to lead the work. An IT department cannot design AI into processes it does not own.

At the governance level, the organisation has a clear policy: what tools are permitted, who can use which data, how intellectual property and privacy are protected, how compliance is handled. Without this layer, the first two levels create risk faster than they create value.

Most organisations are active at the first level, working towards the second, and not yet ready for the third. The companies that get all three right will have a real competitive edge.

Someone needs to own this at a senior level

I believe companies need a dedicated AI lead: not an IT manager who handles AI as a side task, but someone whose primary focus is AI adoption, change management and cross-functional alignment. The title can be Chief AI Officer, Head of AI Transformation, or whatever fits the culture.

This person needs to be a change leader first and a technologist second. The hard part is not the tools; it is shifting how an entire organisation works. In my experience, even a company of 100 to 150 people needs someone in this role if it wants to keep up.

The biggest mistake companies make

Treating AI as someone else’s problem. Waiting for it to settle down. Handing it entirely to IT.

This is not a normal technology refresh. It is closer to what happened when the internet arrived: it did not just add a new channel, it restructured entire industries and made some business models obsolete very quickly. AI looks like an even more fundamental shift, because it changes not just how information is distributed but how work itself is done.

The companies that come out ahead will be the ones that treat this as a strategic priority at the leadership level, not as an IT project running somewhere in the background.

Where Forward Forever fits in

Forward Forever has been working in the Microsoft ecosystem for years. We have built genuine depth in governance, data management and digital transformation: the exact areas that become critical when organisations try to scale AI adoption in a controlled way.

What I keep seeing is that many organisations are moving fast at the individual level but struggling to get organised at the process and governance levels. That is where we can help most: bringing structure, expertise and speed to an area where most teams are already stretched thin.

If your organisation is moving from scattered AI experimentation towards something more deliberate and scalable, it is worth thinking carefully about who owns that work internally and where outside expertise can help you move faster without taking unnecessary risks.

Markko Vaarnas is Chairman of the Board at Forward Forever and an experienced board professional.