08A new kind of project risk
The centre of gravity moves to the business, and the roles of the CTO and the CIO change with it.
Taken together, these changes turn the usual project around, as Figure 8 shows.
In a classic IT project, the technical team is at the centre: it designs, builds, and largely decides when the system works. In a GenAI project, what counts as a good answer, what error is acceptable and which document is true are decided by the business owner, the product owner, the content owners and the experts. The technical work remains substantial, but the technical team no longer defines success. It builds what makes success possible.
Neither side asked for this. For technical teams, it can feel like a demotion. For the business, it can feel like an overload: a maintenance manager becomes product owner, an engineer owns a whole engine family's documentation, an expert spends hours every cycle reviewing answers, and none of their usual work stops.
This creates a risk traditional project management does not cover. An overwhelmed business quietly hands its decisions back to the technical team; a sidelined technical team keeps making them anyway. Either way, decisions about risk, such as what the system does when it doesn't know, end up being made by default, by engineers, without anyone deciding that they should.
A different role for the CTO and the CIO
This shift redefines the role of the CTO and the CIO. It does not make it smaller. Their value is no longer to decide when the system works, but to make sure the right people decide, and to give them what they need: the test set and its results, traceability from every answer to its source, a behaviour when the system doesn't know that is designed rather than accidental. They stop business decisions from being made by default, and they are the first to be protected when those decisions are taken and recorded by the people who own the risk.
The CTO owns the path to production: building from the Walk stage on foundations meant to last, and keeping engaged a technical team whose work no longer defines success but makes it possible. The CIO owns what outlives the first use case: the knowledge base, access rights and test set become assets for other uses, along with data governance, the choice of models and vendors, and control of running costs.
Managing the risk
This risk belongs in the project's risk register. Management can address it with three decisions: name the change of roles explicitly at the start; give the people at the new centre the time and mandate to do the job, which means relieving them of part of their usual work; and give the CTO and CIO the mandate described above, so that their role is redefined rather than reduced.