The debate around AI has moved from whether to adopt it to how to live with it. In all industries, leaders are grappling with how to embed AI into everyday work without compromising trust, data security or people. Last month,

Intelligent CIO Middle East hosted a roundtable, sponsored by Kyndryl, which explored what it really takes to scale AI responsibly; and why culture, data and governance matter as much as the technology itself.

The end of‘ Should we?’ and the start of‘ How do we?’

Not long ago, AI conversations in boardrooms sounded like cautious shopping trips. A pilot here, a chatbot there – a waiting game until the technology felt mature. That era is over. In people operations and performance, the question has shifted from whether to adopt AI to how to make it part of everyday work without breaking trust.

That shift is not just technological. It is cultural, operational and regulatory. The roundtable repeatedly returned to a central truth that AI is not a plug-in. It is a new layer of capability that depends on the fundamentals organisations have often neglected for years, from data quality to skills, from governance to change management.

What emerged was a practical map of what‘ scaling AI you can trust’ actually looks like, including the uncomfortable parts.

Legacy is not a technical problem, it’ s a behavioural one

In almost every industry represented, legacy systems were framed as the first hard wall AI hits. But the more revealing point was that legacy is not simply old software. It is comfort, habit and institutional memory baked into process.

24

INTELLIGENT CIO MIDDLE EAST www. intelligentcio. com