The Business and IT partnership of the future

This is a guest blogpost by Andy MacMillan, CEO of Alteryx.

64% of UK organisations now use AI, up from 52% in 2025. This widespread and growing adoption reflects how quickly AI has moved to operational use within businesses, regardless of sector or size. AI is enabling companies to drive productivity gains and new forms of innovation.  But this is not the first time enterprises have navigated major waves of technological change.

The dot‑com boom changed how organisations thought about their digital presence. SaaS changed buying models and reduced reliance on bespoke systems. Each evolution was significant, but the rate of adoption was slower. Businesses had time to adapt, standardize and draw new lines between business and IT.

The AI era is different, not because disruption is new, but because of the speed and scale of the change. We’re already seeing AI move beyond experimentation and centralised teams into the core of how work gets done across the business. As that happens, success will depend on a new partnership between business and IT that allows organisations to scale AI confidently while maintaining the trust, governance, and visibility needed to drive real outcomes.

From certainty to probability 

As with any form of automation, you can’t just scale what works because you also amplify what doesn’t. Organisations cannot afford to simply scale processes that were never fit for purpose in the first place. AI forces a more fundamental rethink of how work actually gets done.

Previous technological transformations could largely be owned by a central IT team, but AI can’t. Ownership of AI-powered processes will increasingly be shared across lines of business.

The real opportunity lies in redesigning workflows so that data actively drives how tasks are performed, rather than supporting existing processes. Finance, HR and ERP systems used to work separately, built around human workflows. But with AI, automation does the heavy lifting, with humans overseeing and offering judgement where needed. It shifts decisions that require specialism, such as those in accountancy or tax, away from IT teams and back to the domain experts who understand them best and can update the logic that AI systems use.

One outcome of this shift is a move from ‘certainty’ to ‘probability’. Traditional enterprise systems are built around deterministic logic. Right or wrong. Pass or fail. While some decisions will always demand definitive answers (no organisation wants to be ‘probably’ compliant with regulation, for example), in many areas of the business, probability enables powerful new options.

AI creates opportunities across areas such as supply chain, tax, revenue or finance to optimize workflows, surface insights, and support better decision-making under uncertainty. In this context, enterprise AI scales as organisations effectively govern and operationalise their business logic.

Redefining the business-IT relationship 

IT will continue to play a critical role in owning infrastructure, big data platforms, LLMs, endpoints, access controls and more, alongside the governance that ensures reliable, safe and accurate use. But innovation will stall if they become gatekeepers. For example, a product team needs to create a ticket to access the AI or code needed to create it.

This requires a new partnership between business and IT. Business teams must own the logic behind their processes, while IT ensures those processes remain secure, governed, and scalable.

IT specialists aren’t trained in how commissions are calculated or how auditing processes work. Those decisions should sit with sales or tax professionals. There are millions of decisions like this within organisations, and the only way to scale AI across every calculation and answer is by trusting business workflows. Without this balance, organisations risk sliding back into spreadsheet workarounds, overloaded IT backlogs and brittle code that no one truly understands.

There’s a useful parallel from the early 2000s, when organisations debated whether marketing or IT should own the company website. Eventually, it became clear that neither side could do it alone. Marketing shouldn’t be responsible for the infrastructure, but they also shouldn’t need to open a ticket every time they want to publish content. The most successful organisations found a balance. AI demands the same kind of partnership, with business teams owning the logic behind how work gets done and IT providing the guardrails that make it secure, governed, and scalable.

Empowering teams to solve real world problems 

The conversation around AI often focuses on technology, but its biggest implications are organisational. The challenge is not simply deploying AI but rethinking how work gets done when intelligence becomes embedded in everyday business processes.

The organisations that succeed will be the ones that empower domain experts to shape the systems they rely on, while IT provides the data, governance, controls, and infrastructure to make those systems secure, trusted, and scalable. The business-IT partnership of the future will not be defined by who owns AI, but by how effectively people are empowered to use it to solve real business problems.