Who Is Responsible for Making AI Truly Enter the Enterprise? A New Role Is Emerging

In the next five years, many enterprises may face a new question:
not whether they have AI.
But rather:

Who is responsible for making AI truly enter the enterprise?

Over the past 30 years, enterprise informatisation has gone through a similar shift.

In the 1990s, enterprises began implementing ERP.
Many bosses thought:
Isn't buying a software package enough?
But they later discovered:
software is just a tool.

What was truly difficult was:
How should business processes be adjusted?
How should data be governed?
How should employees adapt?
So most enterprises established IT departments.

Today, AI is going through the same process.

Many enterprises have already started buying:
large model platforms,
AI office tools,
intelligent customer service,
digital employees.

But they will soon discover:
after AI is purchased,
who finds the application scenarios?
who connects the business data?
who drives process change?

The answer may not be the traditional IT department.
But rather a new type of role:

AI Transformation Engineer.Or: Enterprise Internal FDE.

01What Do They Do?

They do not research the latest models.
Nor do they develop a generic software product.
What they face every day are real enterprise problems:
Where in the sales process can be automated?
Where in production can be predicted?
How can equipment failures be detected in advance?
Which experience can be turned into AI capability?

Take a manufacturing enterprise, for example.

In the past:
when equipment broke down,
maintenance staff relied on experience to judge.

In the future:
enterprise internal FDEs may drive the creation of equipment Agents:
analysing equipment data in real time,
combining historical maintenance records,
predicting risks in advance,
automatically generating maintenance plans.

What is the biggest change behind this?

Past enterprise digitalisation: moving business into systems.Future AI transformation: making systems begin to understand the business.

02A New Organisational Shift Is Emerging

So in the future, a new organisational shift may occur:

Previously:
IT departments were responsible for digitalisation.
In the future:
AI departments will be responsible for intelligence.

But there is a key question here:
Not everyone in an enterprise can know AI.
Nor can all problems be handed to external vendors.
Truly leading enterprises
will certainly cultivate a group of people who:
understand the business, understand AI, and understand delivery.

Because the biggest competition in the AI era
is not who bought more AI tools.
But rather:

who possesses the organisational capability to make AI continuously evolve.

In the future, the gap between enterprises may not be:
whether they have AI.
But rather:

whether they have a team capable of driving AI to change the enterprise.

In the next issue, we discuss one of the most important industries:
Why manufacturing may be where FDEs are needed most.