The most common structural failure across the source set: governance by committee with no decision rights. Committees that advise but cannot block produce governance theater.
The AI CoE Lead (sometimes formalized as Head of AI or Chief AI Officer / CAIO) must have:
- Authority to block a deployment. Not just advise.
- Ownership of the registry + the exception process for unsanctioned tools.
- Ownership of the AI governance committee agenda. Committees serve the owner; not the reverse.
- Performance goals tied to business outcomes — ROI realized, incidents avoided, agents at target risk levels, adoption metrics. Not "meetings held" or "policies published."
- Direct access to the executive sponsor.
If no one person can stop a bad deployment, governance is decorative.