CEOs don’t need a better AI strategy. They need a clearer story.

In a crowded AI space, chief executive officers must develop a trust narrative that connects AI investments to business value and organisational identity.

In brief

• Many CEOs are asking the wrong AI question. The real challenge is not how quickly to adopt AI, but how to define their organisation’s identity in an AI-enabled future.
• Only 6% of CEOs and COOs can accurately identify appropriate controls for core AI risks, exposing significant governance blind spots.
• Responsible AI requires leaders to learn alongside their organisations, stay close to implementation, and make informed decisions about risk, trust and accountability in real time. 

Over the past few months, I’ve led more than a dozen closed-door sessions with Australian CEOs and senior executives from different sectors and with different appetites for risk. The same question keeps resurfacing: What is our AI story supposed to be?

The answers that leaders often reach for are familiar: frontier firm; fast follower; selective moon-shooter; operational optimiser; agentic enterprise. But these labels ignore the challenge that leaders are circling.

Here’s what I think leaders are really asking: Who are we in our AI story? How do we explain to our board, our people and ourselves what role AI plays in who we become as an organisation?

The latest EY Responsible AI Pulse survey shows just 6% of global CEOs and COOs can accurately identify the appropriate controls for five core AI risks. This suggests leaders are signing off on outcomes shaped by AI without fully understanding how those outcomes were produced.

What strikes me in CEO conversations is that most questions about AI are framed as questions of speed and ambition: How fast do we move? How big is our bet? Do we lead or follow? But these are actually questions about psychological readiness, human judgement and governance maturity – the foundations of responsible AI.

I often describe the AI equation as 60% people, 30% data and 10% technology. But lead with the 10%, and the other 90% will fail.

So, rather than defaulting to yet another discussion about the transformative power of technology, EY brought a range of perspectives – a futurist, a risk professional, creative powerhouse, people strategist and a financial professional – to interrogate what responsible AI means in practice.

Kicking off our series, EY Regional Chief Technology and Innovation Officer for Oceania, Katherine Boiciuc, set a clear challenge for Australian leaders: in a global trust desert, Australia can position itself as a safe haven for responsible AI. KB’s argument was simple. Australia already knows how to build trusted systems. That same institutional know-how can apply to responsible AI.

But EY Regional HR Transformation Leader for Oceania, Peter Fox, offered a warning: “You can’t install responsible AI.” Keeping humans ‘in the loop’ only works if the human knows what they’re doing. Building an AI agent safely demands judgement about data, process, validation, value and risk – skills that many people assembling these tools have never been trained in. This shows how responsible AI is a trust story, not a technical one.

EY Australia, Assurance Partner, Sonia Swinney noted that AI risk is already hitting the P&L. Two-thirds of companies surveyed by the EY organisation late last year did not make the expected return-on-investment in their AI journey. Every AI-influenced decision already carries a financial signature. If leaders can’t explain how a decision was formed, they’re signing off a story they didn’t write.

In marketing, EY Regional Studio+ Leader for Oceania, Stu French, sees AI creation everywhere as content is produced at scale, often outside traditional review processes. “Benign uniformity” and “creative illiteracy” are two of the invisible risks of AI that few leaders have on their radar, he suggested. Brands are shaped over decades “through judgement, instinct, insight and lived experience.” We strip the human story away and trust erodes.

Looking through a risk lens, EY Regional AI Assurance Leader for Oceania, Christina Larkin, observed that many organisations are governing AI as if it were a discrete tool (and something to be owned by IT). But AI behaves like infrastructure: embedded, interconnected and systemic. If we think about AI in story terms, the tools matter less than the world being built beneath them.

What unites all these perspectives is this: everyone is upskilling at the same time, from the top of the house down. This isn’t something leaders can delegate and then govern from a distance. Responsible AI will only scale if leaders stay close to the work.

From where I sit, AI isn’t a new novel. It’s an entirely new genre, and we haven’t finished writing chapter one. Responsible AI gives that story shape. It sets the boundaries, clarifies judgement and ensures that trust grows alongside leadership, accountability and ambition.