10 steps to safely add AI to your Office of the CEO

AI has immense power to either destroy your company or to dramatically accelerate your growth. How do you harness its potential without going off the rails? Here’s a how-to guide to confidently and securely add AI to your CEO Office:

1. Define Goals 

Examine the driving force behind your interest in AI. Is it speed, efficiency, or quality of output?

2. Set Up Safeguards

The Office of the CEO handles the most sensitive information in your organization. You must design security safeguards to make sure that confidential information isn’t leaked or shared with an AI tool.

3. Review Privacy and Risk

Private and personal information must be handled appropriately as well. Document the potential risks should your AI tool gain unauthorized data access, which exposes you to hackers, reputational risk, and trade secret risk.

4. Define Pilot

Now that you have the right guardrails in place, it’s time to design an AI pilot program that allows you to explore your goals in a controlled data sandbox. Draft a program charter that emphasizes risk mitigation and get CEO, CCO, and GC buy-in.

5. Select Tool  

Select a tool that’s best in class and has a reputation for security, privacy, and risk controls. You don’t want to leverage experimental technology with your AI pilot. If something goes wrong, your program will get killed.

6. Test Workflow  

Find a workflow that avoids sensitive information, identify AI leverage points, and test out the tool. For example, market intelligence is an attractive test case since you do not need to input company secrets.

7. Report Metrics 

Based on the goals you set upfront, track metrics—did you complete the task faster? Did you produce more output? Did the quality of your deliverable increase? Share these metrics along with your Office of the CEO team.

8. Write Playbook  

Once you have a workflow that works, it’s time to update your existing playbooks with the new AI embedded in the process. Err on the side of over-explanation to ensure that the tool is used safely.

9. Draft Policy  

To professionalize AI even further in your Office of the CEO, draft an AI policy. This will give your C-suite more confidence on how best to use the tool in a safe and secure manner.

10. Define Roadmap  

Congrats, now you have built out a small AI practice within the Office of the CEO. Assign an AI owner and draft a roadmap of other workflows that could benefit from AI. Share the roadmap with your team and continue on your AI journey.

That’s it—the controlled, risk-mitigated way to add AI to your tech stack in the Office of the CEO.

Contact us here to learn how to safely and effectively integrate AI into your CEO Office while protecting your company's most sensitive information.