Glossary

Plain-language definitions of the terms this bundle uses. It grows as the bundle does.

AI Transformation Lead. The person accountable for running the cross-functional AI transformation program day to day — translating a Chief AI Officer's strategy into a delivered, prioritized portfolio of work.

AI Center of Excellence (CoE). A dedicated team, with a named leader, that turns AI strategy into delivered work: staffing the steering committee, running the intake backlog, and setting standards.

Steering committee. A recurring forum of business and IT leaders with direct access to C-level decision-makers, where program priorities and blockers get resolved.

Intake and prioritization backlog. The running, ranked list of AI initiatives competing for the program's limited capacity — the mechanism that makes "not yet" a process decision, not a personal one.

Gatekeeper model. A CoE structure where all AI delivery routes through a central team for sign-off. Right for an early-stage program; a bottleneck once the program scales.

Advisory model. A CoE structure where delivery lives in the platform/product teams themselves, and the center sets guardrails rather than gatekeeping every project.

Owner (of a use case). The business leader, named before anyone builds, who has the authority to redirect budget and who runs the result after launch.

Delegate. The domain expert the owner names to work with the delivery team every day. The delegate decides what counts as a correct output and supplies the domain questions the team's tests are built from.

Hub. The central AI team, often the CoE, that holds the shared data, security, and platform standards while delivery teams work with the business.

Delivery team. The small team that builds a prioritized use case: the owner's delegate, one or two builders, and an architect from the hub. Vendors often call it a "pod," which is not the same as the standing Owner, Architect, and Verifier unit that runs a process after launch.

Handoff to the owner. The point at which the owner's people can run and change a system without the team that built it.