AI enablement officer: the new sheriff in transformation town
Helping the people side of AI adoption
A dedicated AI enablement team and roles have their value not in technology terms, but for the workforce, according to Diana Bartolic, Head of HR at CCL. “There’s a lot of transformation and change happening in workplaces now, probably more so than we’ve ever seen before,” says Bartolic. “I think less about job loss and more about roles really changing – people doing different things.”
Bartolic adds that with much of leadership doing AI tasks “off the side of our desk,” dedicated AI enablement roles help streamline transformation pieces within the business more quickly as the organization thinks through processes and changes its workforce.
Musti describes Scotiabank’s AI Enablement Engineer position as the connective tissue the organization needed once foundational elements were in place. “Roles like the AI Enablement Engineer provide an important connective layer between technology teams, business teams, and governance functions,” she says. “They help establish common practices, accelerate knowledge sharing, and ensure that adoption is happening in a way that’s both effective and responsible.”
A big risk in AI adoption is that it becomes fragmented without dedicated ownership, which can lead to inconsistent or duplicate use with silos of knowledge rather than organization-wide progress, according to Musti.
AI adoption leads to three types of people in the workplace, says Saxena – the quick adoptive leaders, the laggards, and those in-between. “Our enablement function is primarily the biggest response to harmonizing those three different paces,” he says. “And I think what we’re realizing is that it’s been a good segue because now we actually have a structure of how you can see who’s in which quadrant and how to help them.”
