We pulled a subset of responses from CEOs in the survey to understand how alignment actually looks at the top of the organization, and here’s what we found out:
On average, CEOs rated their executive team’s alignment on AI at 3.19 out of 5. Now, that’s not necessarily low enough to raise alarms on its own, but the distribution tells a more useful story: Not a single CEO rated their team as “completely aligned.”
At the same time, when asked about barriers to AI adoption, 61.9% pointed to leadership alignment and understanding as the primary constraint.
So alignment isn’t just imperfect—it’s the most common reason things don’t move forward.
Alignment looks fine until you try to act on it
A 3.19 average usually means the same thing in practice: no major disagreement, but also…no real clarity either.
Most leadership teams aren’t arguing about whether AI matters, that’s pretty much a foregone conclusion at this point. Where things get less clear is what AI actually means for the organization, how aggressively to pursue it, and which initiatives deserve priority.
AI forces decisions that aren’t easy to defer
A lot of strategic topics allow for loose alignment — you can agree directionally and sort out details over time, but AI doesn’t really behave like that.
It cuts across functions, affects budgeting decisions, introduces risk considerations, and forces tradeoffs between experimentation and control. It shows up everywhere at once. If leadership teams aren’t aligned on how to approach those tradeoffs, decisions slow down or default to the safest option available.
The gap isn’t awareness, it’s shared understanding
CEOs aren’t dealing with a lack of exposure to AI in the slightest. The broader survey actually shows a high personal comfort and strong belief in AI’s impact across leadership, but the issue is that familiarity doesn’t translate into a shared operating model.
Different leaders interpret AI through their own function:
- Technology sees infrastructure and integration
- Risk sees compliance and governance
- Finance sees cost and ROI
- Marketing sees personalization and growth
None of those are wrong per say, but they are incomplete on their own. Without a consistent frame across the leadership team, those perspectives don’t combine into a clear strategy. They compete with each other.
This is where most AI initiatives lose momentum
When alignment is partial, execution tends to fragment, and teams end up moving forward in pockets: A few initiatives get traction. Others stall while waiting for clarity that never quite arrives.
From the outside, it can look like progress is being made. Internally, it feels slower than it should.
What stronger alignment actually looks like
Alignment at this level isn’t about everyone having the same level of technical knowledge.
It’s about agreeing on a few core things:
- What AI is expected to do for the organization
- Where it fits into current priorities
- How risk will be evaluated
- And how decisions will get made as new use cases emerge
Without that, every initiative has to re-litigate the same questions.
Why this shows up as the #1 barrier
It’s easy to assume that technology or regulation would be the biggest constraint, but the data suggests otherwise.
If leadership teams aren’t aligned, the rest of the organization tends to mirror that uncertainty. Teams hesitate, priorities shift, and initiatives lose momentum before they scale. That’s why alignment shows up as the top barrier, because it sits upstream of everything else.
Where this leaves leadership teams
Most credit union leadership teams are already thinking about AI.
Fewer have translated that thinking into a shared approach that the entire organization can operate against. That’s the gap CEOs are pointing to (even if it’s not always framed that way), and closing it requires more consistency in how it’s understood and acted on across the leadership team.
Until that happens, execution will continue to lag behind intent—no matter how strong that intent is.
