Why CEOs can’t delegate AI responsibility – Wrike’s Thomas Scott on leading through AI

Enterprise AI adoption often feels as if it is oscillating wildly between permissive experimentation and iron-fisted governance clampdowns.

But that oscillation is not accidental.

Longstanding management models built to enforce deterministic control are now being asked to govern probabilistic agents — effectively expecting them to tolerate ambiguity they were never designed to handle.

Like most tech leaders, Thomas Scott, CEO of Wrike — which positions itself as a system of record for managing work — has been grappling with these challenges.

And in Scott’s view, the issue is not primarily a tooling problem, but a leadership one. Not because executives need to become prompt engineers, but because without direct exposure to probabilistic behaviour it is almost impossible to understand why existing management assumptions no longer hold. In his view, leaders must experience that ambiguity for themselves — otherwise their governance responses will default to familiar patterns.

Once you start looking, the symptoms of ...