Core question
One department bought and launched an AI tool without telling anyone. How do we prevent that?
Short answer
Create one function accountable for knowing what AI tools are in use, what they do, and what the organization has learned from them. This is not an accounting job and it is probably not an IT job. It requires cross-functional authority and strategic judgment.
A marketing department launched an AI-powered intranet company-wide with no advance notice. Nobody asked IT. Nobody checked what else was being evaluated. It landed like a surprise package on everyone's desk, and then they had to configure it.
That is not an AI problem. It is a governance problem, and most executive teams do not see it until it bites them. When we run an assessment across goals, operations, team capabilities, and governance, governance is consistently the dimension that surprises people.
The fix for both this problem and the spiraling costs that come with it is a central AI intelligence function: one place accountable for knowing what is in use, what it is doing, and what has been learned.
It is not accounting's job. Tracking invoices is not the same as managing a strategic portfolio. It is probably not IT's job either, because IT manages infrastructure while governance of AI decisions requires cross-functional authority and business judgment.
Checks and balances are not bureaucracy. They are how you keep a modest experiment from quietly becoming an expensive problem, and the gap between those two numbers is usually an order of magnitude.