The executives still asking their technology team when the AI strategy will be ready are asking the wrong person the wrong question, the bottleneck is no longer judgment, it is the structure itself.
- A major global insurer restructured its claims triage function in 2024, shifting first-pass authority to an AI system governed by explicit underwriting policy. Claims moved from five-to-seven business days to under four hours. Cost per decision fell by roughly 60% as claim volume scaled. The human review layer moved to policy calibration and exception handling, where it adds irreplaceable value.
- Enterprises that have restructured decision rights, shifting routine, high-volume decisions to policy-governed AI systems with human audit, are not just faster. Their cost per decision falls as volume grows, error correction is faster because accountability is explicit, and leaders spend less time in escalation loops.
- Most current transformation roadmaps do not name the three specific decisions required: decision category classification (automated / AI-assisted / human-led), information flow redesign, and accountability rewrite.
Most executives treat the Digital Cognitive Organisation question as a technology procurement question: which tools have we licensed, when do they go live? That misframe is why most organisations are making DCO design choices by default, one licensed tool at a time. Three-week approval cycles, data siloed across systems, and decision rights distributed across functions that were never designed to coordinate at AI speed are architecture problems, not IT problems.
The question for your next board session is not whether AI will reshape your organisation. It will. The question is whether your leadership team is making the architecture decisions that determine what kind of AI-shaped organisation you become. A Digital Cognitive Organisation is not a future-state ambition, it is the operating standard your most capable competitors are building toward now.
