The "IT mayor" problem is real, and I don't hear it talked about enough.

The “IT mayor” problem is real, and I don’t hear it talked about enough.

Had a scoping call last week with a firm managing $6.5B. Smart team. Genuinely excited about AI. And completely stuck.

Not because of budget. Not because of bad tools. Because nobody owns the infrastructure strategy.

One of them put it perfectly:

“V is a firefighter at the firm. Whereas we kind of need the IT mayor, and we don’t have that.”

The firefighter vs. mayor framing stuck with me. A lot of firms have someone who keeps the lights on. Almost none have someone whose job is to look at the whole tech stack, figure out what’s talking to what, and make a coherent plan.

So when AI comes up, it bubbles up from the bottom. People who see the opportunity, but can’t get anyone to own the roadmap. And the managing members, who are both excited and change-averse, are waiting for a magic moment before they commit.

I think the point here is that the blocker at a lot of firms isn’t AI readiness in the technical sense. It’s governance readiness. Who has the authority and the mandate to actually move this forward?

That’s a harder problem than any integration we build.