This Week's Signal: Issue 7 May 14, 2026

Managing competing priorities across functions is something most Chiefs of Staff have been doing for years. Getting Legal, IT, Finance, and the CEO aligned on anything contentious is core to the role. That part is familiar.

The difference with AI governance is that nobody has a playbook yet. Organizations are figuring out compliance, sequencing, and accountability in real time, without a roadmap, while the tools keep spreading across every function. That lands the conflict resolution problem squarely on the coordination layer. Which is usually the CoS.

This issue concerns what to do when the room is full of strong opinions and no one shares a common frame of reference.

A CoS I know ran the AI inventory prompt from last week's issue. She found 11 tools running without formal approval across four functions. When she brought it to the steering committee, the disagreement started within minutes.

Legal wanted to shut down the highest-risk tools first. IT wanted to standardize what was already widely adopted. Finance wanted to wait until the Q3 budget was confirmed. The CEO looked around the room: so, where do we actually agree?

No one had an answer.

Most functions wanted the same outcome: a system they could trust. They had no shared map of each group's concerns, what was negotiable, and where the overlap lay.

She spent 20 minutes before the next meeting feeding each team's objection into a single prompt, asking for the underlying concern and where they intersected. She walked in with three shared assumptions everyone could agree on before hitting the disputed ground.

The meeting took 40 minutes instead of three weeks.

If you did not grab the free CoS AI Governance Playbook from last week, start there before you get into the prioritization conversation. It maps the governance landscape: the 3-tier model, where shadow AI hides, and the vendor assessment questions, so you have the full picture before the steering committee conversation starts.

Free at cossignal.com/products/the-cos-ai-governance-playbook with code AICOSFREE.

Founding members also have access to the AI Use Policy Template: a one-page fillable policy grounded in the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, built specifically for CoS work. If you are ready to move from governance awareness to a written policy you can put your name on, that is the next step.

$14.99/month, locked for life. Become a founding member today!

Once you have that foundation, Deloitte's State of AI in the Enterprise 2026 report is worth a scan for where organizations actually are in AI maturity versus where they think they are.

Read the Deloitte report

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If you are not yet a member, this is a good week to join. Please consider becoming a member at thecossignal.com to get access to this week’s prompt.

$14.99/month or $99.99/year (locked in for life). limited spots to get in early and help shape what an AI Empowered CoS is, including early access to new resources, features, and products. Become a founding member today!

Please visit me on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/ai-empowered-cos for continued free content.

A recent survey of over 400 governance, risk, and compliance professionals found that 82 percent of organizations are using AI across functions, yet only 25 percent have a fully implemented AI governance program. That 57-point gap almost certainly exists in your organization right now. The pressure to close it falls on whoever coordinates across functions.

Source: AuditBoard, "From Blueprint to Reality" report (July 2025), via Optro & Panterra

Each issue and resource is created with your support.

If you have hit this exact wall, where every function has a different AI priority, and no one wants to be the one to wait, reply and tell me how you handled it. I read every reply.

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