A city has established a cross-functional AI governance board spanning legal, IT, and the equity office. Department heads are now asking who has the authority to approve a new AI use case before it launches. What should the city decide?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
Think about a hospital's ethics committee versus letting each department head decide on their own experimental treatments: pooling legal, clinical, and patient-advocacy perspectives catches blind spots no single department would see alone. A city's AI governance board exists for exactly that reason, so approval sits with the whole cross-functional body, not with whichever office happens to want the tool.
Full Explanation
Assigning approval authority to the cross-functional governance board itself ensures that no single department's blind spot, whether that's an equity concern IT wouldn't catch, a legal risk the proposing department wouldn't anticipate, or a technical limitation legal wouldn't recognize, can slip a new AI use case into production unchecked. Letting the proposing department approve its own use case creates an obvious conflict of interest, since the department pushing for the tool is the least likely to surface reasons it shouldn't launch, undermining the entire purpose of building a governance structure in the first place. Concentrating authority exclusively in IT treats AI adoption as a purely technical infrastructure decision, when in reality a new AI use case also raises legal compliance questions and equity implications that fall outside IT's typical expertise. Concentrating authority exclusively in legal elevates one risk category, regulatory compliance, above others like fairness or technical reliability that the governance board was specifically built to weigh together. A scope caveat: the board's involvement can scale with a risk-tier classification, lower-risk use cases might move through an expedited board process, but the authority itself should still trace back to the cross-functional structure rather than a single department acting alone. A concrete check: confirm the city's AI intake process routes every new use case through the governance board for sign-off before any department can proceed to deployment.