The conventional play for enterprise AI strategies is IT leads, committees advise, everyone weighs in. That produces strategies that live in slide decks and die in execution, writes Eric Dodson Greenberg, Cox Media Group’s chief legal officer. An integrated legal and IT model isn’t an intuitive answer, but it may be the right one for a certain type of general counsel.
“We talk about AI for hours and make no decisions.”
That was a senior executive at a Fortune 50 company telling me about her frustration with an interdisciplinary AI committee. Capabilities vs. cost. Interfaces vs. risks. The conversations went nowhere and got there slowly.
Her experience isn’t anecdotal. It’s structural, and the data confirms it. A Sedgwick survey of Fortune 500 executives found that 70% have established AI risk committees, but only 14% report being fully prepared for deployment. The committees exist; the governance doesn’t.
Boards and CEOs forming standalone AI committees is a seemingly decisive move. But in practice, this allows board committees to shed accountability and fragments oversight across strategy, risk and compliance. Worse, these structures mismatch AI’s rapid development cycles, often measured in weeks, with board meeting cadences measured in quarters. The result is governance that looks proactive on paper but produces decisions that are already stale. Without clear ownership, even well-chartered committees lack the cohesion to act effectively.
So if committees aren’t working, what does?
The reflexive answers fall short
A tempting answer is to invent an AI leadership role. But what is elegant on the whiteboard rarely survives the conference rooms, hallways and competing priorities of the day-to-day enterprise.
It reproduces the same structural problem it’s trying to solve: distributed ownership requiring a new role to impose coherence. A chief AI officer with no existing portfolio, no established relationships and no institutional credibility walks into turf battles with the chief technology officer, governance conflicts with legal and the need to earn trust across a C-suite that didn’t ask for another peer.
The intuitive alternative to a new position is to hand the problem to IT. They have the technical expertise, the infrastructure knowledge, the vendor relationships. But IT is already fighting daily for the enterprise’s survival. More than three-quarters (77%) of CIOs Logicalis surveyed this year said their organization had experienced a cyber attack in the previous year, and 35% said AI is making it harder (not easier) for their companies to detect breaches and attempted attacks. The very same AI capabilities presenting opportunity for enterprise are multiplying the vectors of attack.
In other words: A CEO or board diverting IT leadership from cybersecurity to AI transformation isn’t being strategic — they’re creating exposure on both fronts. Keeping IT focused on security isn’t a limitation. It’s good governance.
The visibility problem
There’s a deeper issue that neither IT nor a committee structure is equipped to solve. Enterprise AI isn’t primarily a technology deployment problem. It’s a corporate visibility problem.
AI’s greatest value lies in adapting to the idiosyncrasies of how departments actually work: how procurement routes approvals, how marketing clears compliance, how HR onboards across jurisdictions. The opportunity is bespoke, not generic. The best AI implementations don’t just automate a process — they reveal inefficiencies the organization hadn’t seen and didn’t know it had.
IT doesn’t typically have visibility into these workflows. IT knows the infrastructure. It doesn’t live inside the business problems that AI is being asked to solve — the cross-functional friction, the risk tolerances, the decision-making patterns that vary by department and geography.
So what the enterprise actually needs is a function that combines three things: structural neutrality, cross-functional insight and governance fluency.
Most corporate departments lack, or are perceived as lacking, the structural neutrality required for AI leadership. Across the enterprise, every function has budget interests, territorial instincts and a track record of favoring its own priorities. Cross-functional visibility means insight into how departments actually operate — what they do, how they do it, where processes intersect disciplines and where the friction lives. Governance fluency means the ability to manage risk, compliance and institutional decision-making at the speed AI requires.
No technology function offers all three. But one C-suite office does.
An unlikely answer
In my experience, and in conversations with other general counsel, legal is already absorbing pieces of AI governance by default and not design. GCs are stepping in when business units deploy tools that create legal exposure, managing risks that no other function claims, filling a vacuum that committees were supposed to address. But default ownership without a mandate is no way to govern. It creates a reactive posture where legal is catching up or course-correcting, rather than mapping strategy.
All of this framed my answer to the Fortune 50 executive stuck in circular AI meetings. And the advice, to her ears, was shocking: the general counsel should lead on AI. Not just participate. Lead.
This answer is deliberately provocative, and I acknowledge it is not the right role for every GC in every organization. But the structural attributes the role brings are systematically underweighted in conventional AI leadership discussions, and surfacing them clearly requires stating the case directly.
That tension was captured in her reaction. “But legal is not a technology function,” she answered.
That reflects a common assumption: legal’s role in AI is defensive — risk mitigation, compliance, guardrails. But that framing misses what’s happening in the market and what the GC actually brings to the table.
The GC’s path to AI fluency is more direct than it might appear. The core competencies of risk assessment, regulatory navigation and ethical governance map directly onto AI’s most consequential challenges, unlike the deeper technical retooling other C-suite leaders would require.
In a landscape where organizations lack clear AI ownership and chief AI officers are increasingly being scapegoated for deployment failures, the GC offers something rare: a leader whose existing expertise aligns with AI’s governance demands, whose cross-functional credibility is already established and who requires no wholesale professional reinvention.
Notably, proposals for a CAIO cover other major C-suite functions but tend to overlook the general counsel. This is a significant blind spot that ignores where AI adoption and capital are actually flowing. Most legal departments (87%) have adopted generative AI in their operations, according to an FTI/Relativity survey from earlier this year.
Legal isn’t just experimenting with AI. Among major corporate functions, it is leading the adoption curve and doing so under real regulatory pressure, not in a sandbox.
The investment market reflects this. Private equity and venture capital have poured unprecedented sums into AI tools designed for legal work — more than $2 billion in legal-related AI startup investment. Why? Because legal work is document-intensive, repetitive but high-value and tightly regulated — exactly what large language models do best. The most sophisticated AI capabilities — contract analysis, document review, knowledge management, risk modeling — are emerging in the legal market first.
But here’s the point the market is only beginning to absorb. These tools have applications far beyond legal. A contract review engine can become a vendor risk assessment platform. A document workflow system can become an HR compliance tracker. Organizations that recognize this can turn legal into the gateway for enterprise-wide AI transformation.
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The solution isn’t legal displacing IT. Rather, the seemingly odd-couple alliance of GC and IT leverages each function’s strengths rather than forcing one to do the other’s job.
IT stays focused on infrastructure, security and technical integration — exactly where its expertise is essential and irreplaceable. The general counsel brings governance, cross-functional insight and proximity to the business problems AI needs to solve. In many organizations, the GC also serves as corporate secretary, giving them a working relationship with the board that few C-suite executives share and a natural channel for ensuring board-level engagement with AI governance.
The recognition is mutual. The 2026 FTI/Relativity report included for the first time perspectives from chief information officers who reported seeing legal departments as “digital ambassadors” for AI and digital transformation. IT is seeing firsthand what the data already shows: Legal has become one of the enterprise’s most AI-fluent functions.
The legal department is no longer just a collection of subject-matter experts. The explosion of legal technology over the past decade has driven the rise of legal operations and created professionals who combine technology fluency with deep insight into how the enterprise actually works.
The GC now has a right-hand adviser who is both schooled in the technology and steeped in the operational realities of the organization: someone who can curate new tools, coordinate with IT and see cross-functional needs and opportunities that neither function would spot alone. That combination of skills is unlikely to be found elsewhere in the enterprise, and it’s receiving increasing investment and emphasis from GCs.
Here’s what that looks like in practice. Three years ago, our legal team led the rollout of an AI-enabled contract management system. The official scope was narrow: centralize agreements, improve version control. But during implementation, legal ops mapped the entire vendor-contract journey and discovered the system could replace a clunky procurement workflow that took three weeks per vendor. Within six months, cycle time dropped to under five days. Finance never lost control of spend, but it stopped owning the workflow. The CFO was relieved not threatened.
No committee could have designed that outcome. It emerged from ownership.
What CEOs and boards should do
The data makes clear that the current approach — committees without mandates, oversight without ownership — isn’t producing results. To think seriously about AI governance, boards will need to rethink the architecture rather than adding another layer to it.
Boards should be asking: Who owns AI strategy and is that role clearly defined? Can non-technical leaders explain the company’s AI strategy, its top use cases and its associated risks? Is there a roadmap for scaling AI?
Where accountability is unclear, the CEO should consider a new, three-part mandate for the GC: lead an AI steering group with explicit authority to recommend priorities; with legal ops and IT as partners, curate existing AI tools and identify cross-functional use cases that can be repurposed in the next year; and define the policies, guardrails and training to ensure that deployments meet legal, regulatory, reputational and ethical obligations.
Not every GC will be suited to this role. Boards and CEOs will need to assess operational fluency, not just legal acumen. GC leadership on AI — and the essential partnership with a CIO or CTO — will turn on dynamics that are nuanced and relationship-dependent. But as a framework, the structural potential is unmatched for a board looking for a coherent AI strategy in the chaos of rapid advances and for CEOs who see operational instinct and legal sophistication in their GCs.
Where the right conditions are present, the GC offers a structural fit that other functions cannot match. Where they are not, boards and CEOs will need to identify the function and the leader who can deliver the same combination of governance fluency, neutrality and enterprise-wide insight through a different path.
The integrated model — IT securing the infrastructure, legal governing the strategy, legal ops coordinating and translating between vendors and the enterprise — is a pragmatic answer to enterprise AI strategy. In an era where AI’s greatest risk is governance failure and its greatest opportunity is cross-functional transformation, the real question isn’t whether this alliance makes sense. It’s how long organizations can afford to operate without it.
Eric Dodson Greenberg is executive vice president, chief legal officer and corporate secretary of Cox Media Group. Before joining Cox Media Group, he was in private practice and served in the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel. 
