Boards say the C-suite owns the AI strategy. The C-suite doesn’t agree

Boards are clear. The C-suite is running AI. In a new Pearl Meyer survey of 108 executives and board members released on Wednesday, 90% of board members said responsibility for leading artificial intelligence effectively belongs with the C-suite and their direct reports—essentially all the most-senior executives within a company. Inside the C-suite itself? Executives are pointing in four different directions. Corporate leaders surveyed in February and March by Pearl Meyer, an executive compensation and leadership advisory firm, splintered into different camps on the question of who among them actually owns AI. The results showed 32% said the C-suite as a group is accountable for AI strategy; 22% pointed to the group one level below the C-suite; 27% pointed to individual business leaders; and 17% said AI sits with functional heads like HR, finance, and legal. As companies move from piloting AI toward enterprise-level rollouts, this divergence of views raises an important question with real-world consequences: If something goes wrong, who is responsible for catching it before it goes public? Pearl Meyer’s data also points to a broader problem underneath the AI governance gap. Boards and executives don’t agree on how cohesive their leadership teams actually are, on whether strategic priorities are traveling down the organization, or even on which factors matter most to scaling AI in the first place. For most companies, those gaps existed before AI exploded as a usable workplace tool. What’s changed now is that AI is the most visible live wire running through them—and the most likely to result in a public gaffe if it’s managed badly. According to Brad Jayne, a principal at Pearl Meyer and one of the survey report’s authors, AI itself isn’t creating new problems. The ownership split is the symptom of a problem that’s been hidden inside C-suites for years. “Your leaders don’t know how to be a team,” said Jayne. “C-suite teams, they can all perform on their own, but colla…