Governance & Authority
Who Owns an AI Decision When Nobody Changed the Approval?
How authority can migrate quietly from human judgment to machine action.
Authority rarely moves in a board meeting. With AI, it moves in small steps: a recommendation that is accepted so often that nobody reads it anymore; a staged payment that is released in batches; a threshold that was 'temporarily' widened.
On paper, the approval matrix is unchanged. In practice, the system is deciding — and the human signature has become a formality.
The governance question is therefore not only whether the model is accurate. It is whether the organisation knows, at any given moment, which level of authority the system effectively holds — and whether that level was ever deliberately granted.
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Personal views of the author; not the views of ING Bank or any other institution.