Council Post: ​Own The Enterprise, Rent The Intelligence

In a Council Post, Doug Shannon argues that enterprises should “own the enterprise” while staying flexible on which AI model they use. He says trying to choose the best model for the future is rarely a successful strategy because large organizations need time for evaluation, security checks, contracting, and production rollout—by then, newer models may already dominate headlines. Instead, Shannon recommends building enterprise architectures that allow model changes without forcing the business to change in parallel. He also emphasizes that technology is often not the hardest part; the difficult work is mapping AI and automation to how people actually operate, including undocumented exceptions and micro-decisions between workflow steps.