Shepherd, speaking at the recent CIO 100 Awards and Conference in Frisco, Texas, encouraged attendees to embrace AI and focus on projects that drive adoption and impact. Organizations that fail to push AI initiatives will be left behind, he suggested, but he also warned that blind adoption, without focusing on meaningful outcomes and guardrails, can lead to huge setbacks.

Many organizations reach for human in the loop as an important control, but no one stress tests it, he adds. “It gets projects approved, and too often, it does the political work, but not the risk work,” he says.

Darren Kimura, CEO and president at AI integration platform vendor AISquared, agrees that many organizations are deceiving themselves with so-called human-in-the-loop systems.