Building an AI-First Center of Excellence: From Legacy Transformation to Enterprise-Wide AI Capability
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Presented at ChiBrrCon 2026 by
Artificial intelligence has reached unprecedented capability levels—foundation models demonstrate sophisticated reasoning, generation, and autonomous action across diverse domains. Yet most organizations struggle to unlock this potential, constrained by fragmented implementations, unclear governance frameworks, and inability to scale beyond isolated experiments. The gap between AI's technical maturity and organizational readiness represents the defining competitive challenge. Old National Bank's Transformation Office has pioneered an AI-First approach through establishment of a Center of Excellence addressing five strategic pillars: Vision, Governance, Culture, Capabilities, and Enablement. This framework positions AI not as a helper, but as how work fundamentally gets done. Our presentation will demonstrate practical implementation through real-world examples including custom AI assistants optimized for individual roles, AI-driven intake processes with automated risk rating and routing, and LLM orchestration frameworks employing specialized models for generation, evaluation, and human-in-the-loop oversight. These implementations illustrate building new processes for AI-integrated operations rather than retrofitting legacy workflows. Critical to sustainable AI capability is governance that enables innovation without creating impediments. We will share our approach to phased implementation with control gates, capability-level risk assessment addressing core AI functions, and productized architectural patterns including RAG for Agents that enable reuse across multiple use cases. Conference attendees will gain actionable insights into establishing AI Centers of Excellence that balance competitive imperatives with responsible risk management. Our framework addresses the challenge of preventing overly rapid adoption with insufficient controls while maintaining organizational agility and innovation capacity. This presentation offers enterprises a roadmap for transforming from AI experimentation to enterprise-wide AI capability, positioning organizations to compete effectively in an AI-native marketplace while maintaining operational resilience and structured governance appropriate to deployment scope.