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.
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