Ask a room of executives who can approve an AI project in their organisation and you usually get one of two answers: everyone, or no one. Both mean the same thing - nothing moves. Ideas queue up behind a decision that has no owner, and the organisation concludes it has a technology problem when what it actually has is a governance problem.
The fix is not a committee. It is a small, named group with delegated authority - we call it an AI council - and it is the first thing we stand up in every Accelerator engagement, whichever pillar a client enters at.
The short version: an AI council is a small group - at minimum a sponsor, a technical person and a business person - with written terms of reference covering scope, membership, delegation and decision rights. It meets monthly, reviews proofs of concept, and decides what happens next. It starts as a three-person steering group and grows into the real thing.
Two kinds of governance, one council
Governance in the GIVE framework has two halves, and most organisations only think about one of them.
Technical governance is the platform side: data loss prevention policies, environment strategy, application lifecycle management, cross-tenant isolation, lifecycle management. It is the part that decides whether the board can stand behind the programme when someone asks where the data goes. It is unglamorous, auditable, and it is where we start - every engagement begins with a client audit so recommendations rest on what is actually there, not what the org chart implies.
Decision governance is the other half: who is on the council, what part of the business it covers, what is delegated to it, and who signs off. For a professional services firm, that scoping question is real - does the council cover one practice group or the whole firm? Answering it in writing is most of the work.
The minimum viable council
You do not need a council to start. You need a steering group of three:
- A sponsor - someone senior enough that a yes from them survives contact with a budget cycle.
- A technical person - someone who can say whether the platform can actually do the thing.
- A business person - someone who owns the process being changed and will live with the result.
That group meets monthly. The agenda is short: see what has been built, decide what happens to it, and decide what comes next. Over twelve months the group takes on the trappings of a council - terms of reference, a decision log, delegated authority - because it has been making real decisions all along. The council is grown, not installed.
What goes in the terms of reference
The terms of reference is the artefact that turns a meeting into a mandate. Ours covers four things:
| Section | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Scope | Which part of the business does this council govern - one division, one practice group, or everything? |
| Membership | Who sits on it, and what does each seat represent? |
| Delegation | What can the council approve on its own authority, and what must go up? |
| Decision rights | Who signs off on what - and what evidence a signature requires |
Alongside it sit the working documents: an agenda template, minutes, an action log and a decision log. The decision log matters more than it sounds - it is the difference between "we discussed this last quarter" and "we decided this on 12 March, here is why, and here is what changed".
What the council actually does month to month
The monthly cadence is the engine. In practice each session does three jobs:
- Showcase - see the current proof of concept or build working, not a status slide about it.
- Decide - continue, stop, or redirect. A stopped project with reasons on the decision log is a good outcome, not a failure.
- Re-prioritise - when a proof of concept hands over to build, the council asks what is next. Another use case? Time to generate ideas? The gate keeps the pipeline moving instead of ending at the first win.
The council is also what makes the Value pillar enforceable. A signed-off way of comparing use cases only means something if a group with authority applies it - including to ideas that arrive with a loud sponsor attached.
Where to start
If you have nothing: name the three people, put a monthly hour in the diary, and give them one real decision to make at the first session. If you have a committee that talks but does not decide: write the delegation section of the terms of reference first, because that is the part that is missing.
We go deeper on why decision-making is one of the three things most organisations are missing in three things most organisations are missing, and the council's place in the wider framework in the GIVE framework.