AI Operating Framework and Governance

Are you a finance leader, executive, or board member who senses that artificial intelligence is reshaping everything around you, yet finds yourself uncertain about how to lead through the transformation? You are not alone in this feeling, and this book was written precisely for you. You have built a successful career. You have navigated complexity, managed risk, and delivered results in environments where accountability is real and decisions carry weight. You are a thoughtful leader and a lifelong learner. Yet when it comes to AI, something feels different. The frameworks that served you well for decades suddenly feel inadequate. The traditional approaches to capital allocation, governance, and organizational design were never built for systems that learn, adapt, and evolve faster than your planning cycles can accommodate. What if there was a clear, tested framework for integrating AI into your operating model in a way that builds lasting capability rather than creating fragility? What if governance could become a source of competitive advantage rather than a bureaucratic obstacle? What if you could approach AI investments with the same clarity and confidence you bring to every other strategic decision? AI Operating Framework and Governance: Perspectives from a System CFO reveal the practical, battle-tested principles behind designing organizations that can harness artificial intelligence while maintaining the accountability, transparency, and resilience that sustainable success requires. In this book, you will discover: • How to design AI as an integral part of your operating model rather than treating it as a disconnected experiment running in the background. • A new approach to valuing AI investments through compounding capability rather than the short-term ROI calculations that consistently mislead organizations. • Practical guidance on establishing governance through decision rights, accountability structures, and guardrails that protect the business while allowing learning to scale. • The evolving role of the CFO as the steward of organizational intelligence in an era where data, algorithms, and human judgment must work together. • Real-world case studies drawn from cybersecurity, SaaS, manufacturing, gaming, and healthcare, along with Monday Morning tools you can implement immediately. • How to think clearly about AI risk, ethics, and accountability when the conventional playbooks offer no useful guidance. • A framework for leading through uncertainty without pretending to have answers that do not yet exist. Drawing on more than 25 years of experience as a CFO and systems leader across diverse industries, Hindol Datta has woven models from other domains and frameworks, which he documents in this book. He believes that the latticework of domains provides the foundation to create a resilient system. This book does not pretend to have all the answers. Datta is the first to admit that nobody does right now. What it offers instead is something more useful: a way to think clearly when the ground keeps shifting, and to develop the judgment that lets you make decisions you can stand behind even when certainty is nowhere to be found. Artificial intelligence is becoming the nervous system of modern organizations. But a nervous system without a spine is just signals with nothing to hold them together. Someone needs to build that spine. If you are reading this, that responsibility has probably landed on your desk already. This book gives you a head start and helps you build something solid, something that holds up when the hype fades, and the real work begins.