Ask any leadership team whether they’re aligned on why the organisation exists and what it stands for, and you’ll get a confident yes. Ask them to each write it down separately, and you’ll usually get four or five different answers wearing the same words.
That gap, between assumed alignment and actual alignment, is not a new problem. What’s new is that it no longer stays quiet. AI is forcing every leadership team to make fast, high-stakes calls about what the organisation will and won’t do, and those calls expose anything that wasn’t actually agreed in the first place.
We’ve watched this land twice this year, in rooms full of people who don’t normally sit at the same table.
At the Data Impact Leadership Forum in Edinburgh, Alan Crawley of Optima Partners opened with a blunt distinction: leadership readiness for AI isn’t about technical fluency, it’s about whether ambition has been turned into something coherent enough to hold an organisation together.
BCG’s research, cited in that same session, found fewer than one in five organisations have actually embedded AI leadership at scale. Most are stuck running pilots without ever aligning the culture, governance and accountability underneath them.
Then, at another FinTech-Tables Forum in Belfast, the conversation arrived at the same wall from the regulatory side. Senior managers, the room agreed, cannot outsource accountability for AI-driven decisions – not to a vendor, not to a policy document, not to an assumption that “we’re all roughly on the same page.” Under existing frameworks like SMCR, the individuals at the top of a regulated firm have to be able to stand over every material decision AI plays a part in. Most currently can’t demonstrate that they could.
Neither room was talking about a lack of ambition or a lack of intelligence. They were describing the same structural gap: organisations investing heavily in AI strategy while leaving the thing that has to hold it together, genuine, tested leadership alignment, unmeasured.
Across FinTech-Tables forums, the challenge of leadership is the one that comes up in almost every conversation we have, for a simple reason: it’s upstream of everything else. If a leadership team hasn’t agreed and documented what the organisation is actually for, and hasn’t tested whether that agreement holds beyond the boardroom, then talent decisions drift, cross-team collaboration has no shared reference point, and AI adoption gets chased opportunistically rather than against a clear strategic purpose.
Purpose and values, in most organisations we talk to, live in informal conversation rather than agreed, documented practice. Leadership alignment around them is assumed rather than tested. And when alignment gaps do exist, they rarely have a named owner or a deadline attached, so they simply persist, becoming background noise until a moment of real pressure (a regulatory question, a difficult AI trade-off, a public misstep) forces them into view all at once.
The uncomfortable truth our Forums landed on independently: most leadership teams don’t yet have a “live” answer to whether they’re aligned. They have a felt sense of it, formed in meetings and hallway conversations, that has never actually been tested against what each individual leader believes.
The organisations making real progress on this aren’t the ones with the most polished five-year strategy document. They’re the ones who’ve made purpose and alignment a standing, revisited discipline rather than a once-agreed artefact: purpose reviewed as AI changes what the organisation does, alignment measured rather than assumed, gaps named with an owner and a deadline, and that alignment made visible enough to cascade consistently to the wider business, not just live at the top table.
That’s a different kind of leadership work than most organisations are currently set up to do. It starts with an honest, evidenced answer to a simple question: where does your leadership team actually stand?
Our free 15-minute Leading through Disruption diagnostic, developed alongside our partners SolasOS, includes a dedicated section on leadership clarity and alignment – giving you an instant, evidence-based read on where the gaps are, rather than another assumption to add to the pile.
Start the diagnostic: solas-os.ai/readiness
Next in this series: why most organisations are managing talent and retention on manager memory — and what that’s quietly costing them.
This article draws on discussion from FinTech-Tables’ AI & Data Leadership Forum (Belfast, June 2026) and the Data Impact Leadership Forum, (Edinburgh, September 2025), alongside research from BCG.
