The risk: launching AI as isolated pilots spawns shadow IT and compliance gaps. The fix: a 90-day operating cadence with clear decision rights, human-in-loop validation, and in-region controls.
1) Decision rights and steering
- Steering (CIO/COO/CFO): approve scope, KPIs, guardrails.
- Design Authority (CAIO + Risk): model allowlist, prompt QA, red-team on high-risk flows.
- Delivery pods: accountable for throughput, uptime, and rollback readiness.
2) Guardrails and human-in-loop
- Validation tiers: auto (low-risk routing), approve (ops comms), co-create (finance/clinical).
- Auditability: watermark outputs with source/model/time; store in logs.
- Data: mask PII, restrict to in-region hosting, encrypt secrets via KMS.
3) 90-day cadence (Dubai)
- Weeks 0-1: intake top 5 workflows, classify risk, set KPIs and payback target.
- Weeks 1-3: Strategy sprint—ROI model, control checklist, comms plan.
- Weeks 3-10: Build 3–5 workflows; QA with dual review on finance/health; publish runbooks.
- Weeks 10-12: Harden—red-team, failover model, finalize SLAs, support training.
4) UAE-specific assurances
- In-region data residency; no cross-border without approval.
- SSO/MFA and least-privilege RBAC for all consoles.
- Vendor allowlist with fallback model; incident playbook with rollback.
5) What to automate first
- Finance: reconciliation, variance explanations with human sign-off.
- Ops: ticket triage, exception summaries, vendor comms drafts.
- Support: knowledge retrieval with citations; route to humans on low confidence.
6) Measurement that boards accept
- Efficiency: hours removed, cycle-time delta.
- Quality: error rate vs baseline, appeal rate, rework.
- Financial: payback days, margin impact.
- Adoption: human-touch %, active users, opt-outs.
Next step: Run the readiness check or book a 30-minute steering session to set your 90-day AI plan.