Why AI Strategy Belongs in the President's Office
The most dangerous words in higher education right now are "we have a committee working on AI." It's a pattern playing out across campuses with remarkable consistency, one that tends to unfold in the same predictable sequence. A president recognizes that AI is no longer optional. Feeling the urgency but uncertain of the path, they convene a task force, assign a committee, and hand the initiative to HR, a newly minted innovation team, or a willing provost. Then, having checked the box, they move on.
Six months later, the consequences of that handoff become visible not as a single failure, but as a quiet fragmentation. One department is running a chatbot for advising. Another purchased a productivity tool that IT didn't know existed until after the contract was signed. A third drafted an AI policy that bears little resemblance to what faculty are actually doing in the classroom. Everyone is busy, and everyone believes someone else is steering. No one is coordinating, and the institution, as a whole, has not moved an inch in any coherent direction.
This is a leadership failure, and it is happening at scale, quietly and simultaneously, at institutions that consider themselves forward-thinking. Educause's 2025 AI Landscape Study found that 57% of institutions now consider AI a strategic priority, which sounds like progress until you read the next number. Only 22% have an institution-wide strategy to show for it. Of those, more than half are managing adoption on an ad hoc basis across disconnected departments, essentially improvising at scale. The institutions that are actually closing that gap share one thing in common, and it is not a better committee, a larger budget, or a more sophisticated technology stack. It is a president who never handed off the wheel.
AI Is a Change Management Juggernaut First
The instinct to treat AI as a technology problem is understandable. Technology is visible. It has vendors, demos, and price tags. But the reason most campus AI efforts falter has nothing to do with the tools and everything to do with who owns the change.
AI touches workforce roles, academic integrity, curriculum design, student services, data governance, and budget allocation simultaneously. Taken together, that scope describes an institution-wide transformation, and no provost, CIO, or HR director has the cross-functional authority to lead one. Only the president does.
In my experience working across hundreds of institutions, the pattern holds consistently across every major organizational transformation. When the chief executive leads from the front, change sticks. When they hand it off, it stalls. AI demands the one thing only a president can provide, which is an institutional mandate with real resource authority attached.
What Delegation Actually Produces
When AI strategy is sent down the leadership ladder, predictable things happen. Departments buy point solutions without enterprise coordination. Shadow systems emerge. Faculty and staff receive conflicting guidance. Students experience inconsistency across the institution.
Educause also found that 34% of educators believe their executive leaders are underestimating the cost of AI adoption, and only 2% report that new funding sources have been identified for AI projects. Underestimated costs plus no new resources is a setup for stalled momentum. It tells you that the financial and strategic architecture of AI hasn't been claimed by the people who control institutional capital. That is a presidential-level problem.
Act Now or Spend 2028 Catching Up
The institutions that move now, with coherent, president-owned AI strategies, will build compounding advantages in student outcomes, operational efficiency, and institutional resilience. The ones that continue managing AI piecemeal will find themselves in 2028 with a patchwork of incompatible tools, unresolved governance questions, and a widening gap between what students expect and what the institution can deliver.
This three-year window matters because AI is accelerating. Decisions made today about governance, data infrastructure, workforce upskilling, and academic integration will determine whether your institution is building on a foundation or perpetually starting over. A steady executive hand is the only thing that holds it together.
Most importantly, without a unified data platform that makes sense of all your institutional data, gives it context, and makes it available for governed innovation, you'll repeat the last 20 years of SaaS sprawl and technical debt. The president has to call for one unified platform on which all AI innovation happens.
What Presidential Ownership Actually Looks Like
Leading AI transformation means owning the narrative, the mandate, and the accountability structure, while delegating execution to the right people. In practice, that means four things:
- Be the visible sponsor. When people know the president owns an AI strategy, engagement rises, shadow systems surface, and the organization gains political cover to move decisively. That signal cannot come from anyone else.
- Build a cross-functional structure that reports to you. The team coordinating AI strategy needs to sit close to your office, and not inside a single division. Bring together academic affairs, IT, student services, finance, and HR. Your CIO is a critical partner in this structure, acting as the bridge between institutional vision and technical execution.
- Make the first resource and infrastructure decisions yourself. Real progress requires reallocating budget, naming priorities, and making the uncomfortable calls about what to stop doing. You pick the foundational platform; the team can do the rest. That conversation and clear direction doesn't happen without presidential involvement.
- Let HR do what HR does best. HR is an essential partner, coordinating training, refreshing job descriptions, and supporting workforce transitions. The mistake is making HR the owner of AI transformation. Presidents set the mandate. HR makes it stick.
The Call Is Yours
Nine in 10 college students are already using AI academically, and nearly three-quarters say their usage has increased over the past year. That means the adoption decision has already been made, on your campus and every other. What remains is whether that adoption will be coherent, strategic, and mission-aligned, or fragmented, reactive, and driven by whoever has the energy to buy the next tool.
The president is the only person who can determine which of those it will be. Your institution has plenty of people willing to form a committee. What it needs is for you to lead.