Want to know how fast your company will adopt AI? Don't look at your strategy deck. Look at your IT department.
IT Controls the Gates
IT departments are the gatekeepers of technology and data. They decide what tools people can use. They control access to databases, APIs, and infrastructure. They set the security policies. This puts them in a unique position when it comes to AI adoption. What happens inside IT has an outsized effect on what happens outside of it.
AI-assisted workflows and agentic processes only start to fly with people who are motivated. People who've tried things, seen what works, and gotten excited about the possibilities. These people influence others. They show colleagues what's possible. They create momentum. And in most companies, the first place this can happen at scale is IT.
The Spark and the Block
The spark for AI adoption can come from anywhere in the organization. Someone in marketing figures out how to use AI for content. Someone in finance automates a reporting workflow. But here's the thing: IT can block these outside sparks easily. New tool? Needs IT approval. Access to company data? Goes through IT. Custom integration? IT has to build it or allow it.
This makes what happens in IT disproportionately important. If IT is excited about AI and actively using it, they'll enable others. They'll fast-track approvals. They'll build the infrastructure that makes AI accessible. If IT hasn't bought in, every request becomes a ticket in a queue. Every new tool gets stuck in a review process. The spark dies.
Use It, Then Enable It
IT departments need to do two things. First, use AI tools and methodologies themselves. You can't evangelize what you haven't experienced. When IT engineers use AI in their daily work, they understand what's possible. They know the limitations. They can make informed decisions about what to roll out and what to hold back.
Second, and this is the part many IT departments miss: empower the business side. Give people access to their data. Make it possible for business users to create their own tools, or at least come up with informed ideas for what IT could build. This is where real AI adoption happens. Not in IT building things for the business, but in the business understanding what's possible and co-creating solutions.
The Bottleneck You Might Not See
You might have enthusiastic AI champions in your marketing, sales, or operations teams. People who really get it and want to move fast. But if IT isn't on board, those champions hit a wall. They can't access the data they need. They can't deploy the tools they want. They can't connect AI to the systems where it would matter most.
Even if your AI initiative is led by someone outside of IT, the dependency is real. IT doesn't have to actively resist. They just have to not prioritize it. That's enough to stall everything.
What This Means for You
If you're thinking about AI adoption in your company, start by looking at your IT department. Are they using AI themselves? Are they excited about it? Are they making it easier for others to experiment? Or are they treating every AI request as just another project in the backlog?
Your AI adoption journey depends more on what happens in IT than most people realize. They can be your biggest accelerator or your biggest blocker. Be aware of this dependency before you plan anything else.