Six Steps To Setting Up An AI Council

So why have an AI council? AI councils are often misunderstood. but can play a key role in guiding your organization towards developing a robust AI strategy. Typically, the purpose of the AI council is to provide strategic direction, establish ethical AI governance, drive internal AI adoption, and promote AI literacy, ensuring both a responsible and transformative integration of artificial intelligence throughout the company.

Without an AI council, there is a larger risk of misuse of data, a fragmented approach to AI adoption between functions, lack of best consistent best practice and data privacy/accuracy issues.

But what are the key steps to setting up an AI council? Below are a set of practical steps to establish an effective AI council.

1. Define the council’s role and craft a clear mission statement. Decide whether the AI council will be marketing-only or company-wide. The objectives could be quite narrow, such as focusing only on increasing AI literacy, or they could be broader and include full accountability for AI strategy and execution.

2. Nominate a chair to run the council. This could be an individual who is particularly curious or knowledgeable about AI or a senior member of the company who can recruit and rally council team members. However, that person must be able to sell the benefits of having an AI council to the board and the broader team.

3. Recruit council members. For a marketing department, you may want representation from key functions such as acquisition, customer engagement, brand, and marketing analytics, etc. It is wise to involve legal, IT, and procurement — and perhaps even a third-party advisor who is an expert in the marketing domain.

4. Secure an executive sponsor — whether that be the CMO or another member of the senior management team — to ensure you have support when making difficult decisions.

5. Conduct an AI maturity audit. From a technological point of view, understand what AI tools or model licenses the organization already holds. This will reveal whether tools have been purchased but AI features remain unused. From a non-technical point of view, determine whether policies exist in writing and whether a verbal roadmap of AI projects needs to be formalized. Also identify the barriers to adoption: Is it a lack of knowledge, inadequate training, unclear policies, or resistance from central IT?

6. Develop a phased roadmap. This should cover the full spectrum of AI needs — policies, tools, training, goals, success metrics, and business cases. Include a realistic timeline, resource requirements, and a change-management plan.

7. Define KPI dashboards — for example, time-to-prototype, percentage of staff AI-trained, and ROI from AI pilots — to keep the council accountable.

8. Establish a process for rapid experimentation and safe-to-fail pilots so the organization

can learn quickly without jeopardizing customer or brand trust.

9. Communicate wins early and often to build momentum and demystify AI for the wider

workforce.

By following these steps, an AI council can evolve from a well-meaning idea into a pivotal governance body that accelerates responsible AI adoption and delivers measurable business value!