Deliberate Decisions

How Grounded Leadership is Advancing the Path to Enterprise AI Value

The decisions data and AI leaders make today will shape their organisations for years to come. Yet they are making them amid rising expectations, uneven readiness and continuous change.

Drawing on open peer discussions at DataIQ Guild 2026, this report captures how senior leaders are testing assumptions, weighing trade-offs and making the deliberate choices needed to turn AI ambition into sustained enterprise value.

Produced in partnership with Databricks

Early AI success is raising expectations faster than many organisations can absorb. Demand is increasing, ownership is often unclear, and leaders are being asked to maintain momentum without locking the enterprise into decisions that may not hold.

This report brings together the experiences of senior data and AI leaders navigating those tensions in practice.

You’ll learn:

How organisations are making AI investment decisions under uncertainty
How leaders are clarifying ownership and accountability as AI crosses organisational boundaries
How leaders are maintaining momentum without closing down future options
What it takes for early AI success to translate into sustained enterprise value
How leaders are protecting human judgement as AI takes on more work

Download the DataIQ Guild 2026 report exploring how senior data and AI leaders are making decisions, maintaining flexibility and creating sustainable enterprise AI value.