The Gist

• AI is a board-level mandate. Boards must go beyond ROI and ask if the organization is strategically, technically and culturally ready for AI at scale.
• Strategy, tech and culture matter equally. Customer experience leaders need forward-looking bets, the right tools and ownership and a workforce empowered to adapt.
• Readiness defines leadership. True AI advantage comes from holistic readiness, not isolated pilots—boards that wait risk narrowing their opportunity.

AI is now central to strategy, not just operations. But many boards still lack a clear lens to evaluate its impact? And as AI adoption accelerates, boards and executive teams are grappling with an essential question: how do we know it’s working?

Evaluating AI impact isn’t just about tracking ROI or measuring model accuracy. It’s about understanding whether the organization is truly ready — strategically, technically and culturally — to embrace AI at scale. The real opportunity lies in turning AI from isolated pilots into a sustained source of advantage.

So where should business leaders start? Let’s break it down across three critical areas: strategic awareness, technical aptitude and cultural readiness.

Table of Contents

Strategic Awareness: Are You Seeing the Big Picture – and Acting on It?

To lead with AI, boards should first ask: do we have a forward-looking, competitively informed view of how AI is reshaping our industry? If the answer is unclear, it may be time to revisit strategic priorities.

High-performing organizations place bold, forward-looking bets. That might mean investing in customer experience transformation, rethinking core product offerings or experimenting with entirely new business models enabled by AI.

Importantly, this isn’t a one-time strategy session. Many leading organizations systematically monitor AI moves by competitors, startups and emerging players. They use AI to help set strategy and envision opportunities, along with keeping an eye on how hyperscalers, research labs and ecosystem partners are evolving and act accordingly.

Technical Aptitude: Do You Have the Tools, Talent and Infrastructure to Execute?

Even the best AI strategy can stall if the technical foundation isn’t there. Boards should assess: does our organization have the infrastructure, data, and leadership to build and scale AI responsibly?

This isn’t just about hiring more data scientists. It’s about aligning cloud, data and app platforms to support real-time decision-making, automation and agent-based systems. It means building AI capabilities that are unified, governed and reusable – think modular pipelines, agents and APIs that scale across use cases.

Another key question: Who owns AI execution?

In top-performing companies, AI is not confined to an innovation lab. Ownership is shared across business and technology functions. And more importantly, those leaders are technically fluent in the sense that they understand how AI works and feel empowered to act.

A final, often overlooked question: what’s our plan to manage technical debt?

Legacy systems, siloed data and outdated workflows can quietly sabotage AI progress. Modernization efforts should run in parallel with AI deployment, otherwise, progress often stalls before it scales.

Cultural Readiness: Is the Organization Willing – and Able – to Change?

Perhaps one of the most underestimated components of AI success is culture. While AI requires new tools, it also demands a completely new mindset. One that encourages exploration, experimentation and rapid iteration.

Boards should ask: is our leadership and workforce ready to continuously adapt and adopt AI?

An innovative culture isn’t built overnight. It requires visible AI champions who are credible, resourced and empowered to lead. It also means investing in AI literacy across all levels of the business, not just in data teams.

Even more than upskilling, this is about embedding AI understanding into fundamental decision-making, operations and even customer conversations. Everyone, from frontline employees to the C-suite, should have a baseline understanding of what AI is and what it’s not.

Finally, cultural readiness means staying connected to the broader ecosystem, which includes startups, venture capital firms, academia and research communities. This is because no single company can build the future of AI alone.

Related Article: Your Missed Opportunity in Customer Experience Culture

A New Mandate for AI Leadership

The boardroom conversation around AI is shifting. It’s no longer just about “should we invest?” but instead, it’s about “are we investing wisely – and are we ready for what’s next?”

A new partnership between Black Tech Street and NVIDIA is setting the stage for a major leap in Tulsa’s innovation economy.

The organizations signed a Memorandum of Understanding to develop Greenwood, the site of the original Black Wall Street, into a national leader in artificial intelligence.

“This is going to have an incredible impact on Tulsa,” said Terrance Billingsley II, chief executive officer of Black Tech Street. “NVIDIA is the most valuable company in the world, leading the most important technological revolution in human history.”

The collaboration includes plans to train up to 10,000 learners, support local AI startups, and offer advanced technology resources, all aimed at driving economic growth in the Greenwood District and beyond.

Training 10,000 future innovators

A major part of the plan includes AI training programs designed to reach thousands of students, workers and entrepreneurs across the Tulsa region.

Black Tech Street will lead the creation of the Greenwood AI Center of Excellence, a project funded through Tulsa’s Tech Hub award from the U.S. Economic Development Administration. Of the 51 million dollars awarded to the Tech Hub, 10.6 million will go toward the AI center.

Training will be conducted in partnership with local schools and universities, including Langston University, Tulsa Community College and Oklahoma State University.

Educators will also have access to certification through the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute University Ambassador Program, which provides cloud-based tools powered by NVIDIA GPUs.

Local economy at the core of the mission

“This is going to be a monumental situation and it is going to affect a lot of people on the ground,” Billingsley said. “The next step is getting NVIDIA integrated into the community, getting certain programs up and running for people to take advantage of, hosting different events, and trying to architect what the big play that is going to transform our local economy is going to be.”

The partnership aims to spark high-paying tech jobs and drive entrepreneurship in Greenwood. According to the agreement, NVIDIA will offer startups access to its Inception program, which helps early-stage companies grow with technology support and networking.

NVIDIA will also provide advanced computing resources, including access to GPUs and cloud platforms for local AI projects.

A collaborative vision with broad support

The agreement is not just local. It sets a foundation for future expansion across Oklahoma.

“Oklahoma is fast becoming a national leader in next-generation innovation, from AI to aerospace and beyond,” said U.S. Sen. James Lankford. “Whether it is in Tulsa or across the state, Oklahoma is proving that you do not have to be on the coasts to be on the cutting edge.”

Louis Stewart, NVIDIA’s head of ecosystem development, echoed that vision. “Our collaboration with Black Tech Street and the larger Tulsa ecosystem is helping prepare and equip all segments of the workforce to operate and sustain transformative technology that is building America’s future.”

Tulsa Mayor Monroe Nichols said he is excited to see the two organizations come together.

“NVIDIA and Black Tech Street are setting the stage for new jobs for Tulsans, and I am eager to see how this investment in innovation will open more doors of opportunity for our community,” Nichols said.

What comes next for Greenwood and beyond

Black Tech Street will continue working with partners, including Tulsa Innovation Labs, Microsoft, Langston University, Tulsa Economic Development Corporation and others to expand the program’s reach.

Marriott International is executing a multiyear digital and technology transformation plan that aims to retool the company, replace systems and develop a cloud-native innovation fabric to accelerate modernization. 

The company’s technology teams are simultaneously helping to scale high-priority generative AI use cases and exploring where AI agents could bring benefits down the road, according to Naveen Manga, global chief information officer at Marriott. 

“We’re in deep discovery with agents,” Manga told CIO Dive. “We have an agentic mesh capability that we’re building in our horizontal AI architecture, and we’re looking at use cases.”

The agentic layer will allow Marriott to create capabilities once and reuse them in multiple places. It’s core to the company’s AI playbook and part of its model-agnostic chassis, Manga said. 

Automating high-cost processes and improving experiences are two key priorities. The goal is to move associates away from manual, repetitive tasks to focus on better serving guests. 

“We’re looking at those capabilities to fix outdated processes, but we’re definitely not in any pilot with agentic,” Manga said. “We’re always experimenting with emerging technologies with both ambition and caution.”

Enterprises have high hopes of streamlining processes and improving workflows with AI agents, but there are plenty of unknowns accompanying the nascent technology. Fast movers are expected to face roadblocks, with Gartner predicting more than 40% of enterprise AI projects will be scrapped by the end of 2027. 

“We want this tech to be powered by trust,” Manga said. “We want to deploy technology that is responsible, ethical and lawful.”

Security focus

Most enterprises are exploring opportunities but not ready for widescale implementation as tech foundations get upgraded. 

Better cybersecurity and technology is a priority for Marriott, which owns 30-plus hotel and timeshare brands, including MGM Collection, Westin and The Ritz-Carlton. 

“Marriott’s cybersecurity strategy spans governance, risk management, operations, and compliance, and using the right AI tools and technology are a key part of that strategy,” Manga said. “We continuously monitor the landscape as AI is a fast-evolving space. We remain committed to creating a culture of education and the responsible, ethical, and lawful use of AI.”

The sustained focus comes after the Federal Trade Commission settled a yearslong investigation into a series of Marriott breaches in October, requiring the Maryland-based company to make a number of data privacy improvements. 

“As part of the resolutions with the FTC and the State Attorneys General, Marriott will continue implementing enhancements to its data privacy and information security programs, many of which are already in place or in progress,” Marriott said in an October statement.

The company is beginning to see its efforts around replatforming and cloud come to fruition, following several years of higher-than-historical investment. 

“As of this week, we’ve begun the beta launches of our technology,” Manga said in late August, referring to the new central reservation system, property management system and loyalty system. About six hotels have beta access, and the phased launch will continue over the next 18 months. 

“From the onset, we’ve told our 800,000 associates that are going to use our technology that we’re not going to build it for you; we’re going to build it with you,” Manga said. “We created end-user councils, and we brought them along the journey.”

Manga has helmed the initiative, joining the multinational hospitality giant in 2021 as global chief technology officer before assuming his current role a few months ago. 

“In the new role of CIO, I’m also responsible for the technology department, the broader technology budget and our related aspirations for the company,” Manga said. “We have not backfilled the CTO role, nor do we have plans to. The head of technology is the CIO role.”

‘Ruthless prioritization’

In the era of AI everywhere, CIOs have had to polish off their project prioritization techniques. 

Marriott devised a four-part framework to guide its AI efforts, focusing on trust, accountability, prioritization and human-centered innovation.

“We set out by creating our AI principles and governance policies right out of the bat,” Manga said. “We use the governance that we’ve established in our company as the backbone to ensure that every AI use case is safe and reliable.”

The company has a few buckets of use cases: create, find, analyze and automate. Each unlocks different value for the company and are in service of guests, associates and owners or franchisees. 

“We pilot first, then we adapt, then we refine before we scale our solutions to the global portfolio,” Manga said. “It’s about ruthless prioritization.”

Earlier this year, Marriott conducted an initial pilot of Microsoft’s 365 Copilot with about 100 associates across different disciplines, Manga said. Now, the company is rolling it out to thousands of its workers for meeting summaries and transcriptions, among other use cases. 

Marriott is also closely monitoring an AI-powered trip planning tool that a number of Bonvoy members have access to. Later this quarter, the company plans to expand its access to hundreds of associates. 

The hospitality company has boosted SEO traffic to its website by using generative AI to generate content as well. Other use cases include an AI coach for contact center agents. 

“In the past experiments, we were building these enterprise use cases and vertically integrating them into the technology stack. What we’ve learned is that for us to really get a faster speed to market — because we’re looking at 10 use cases for 2025 — we don’t want to build each of these projects independently,” Manga said, referring to the in-progress, model-agnostic technology architecture. 

The governance framework guiding these efforts is about three years in the making — and Manga expects it to not stay the same forever. 

“It’s going to change and continuously iterate,” Manga said.