
AI-Native Leader: Spotlight on Bethany Warburton, Brown University Facing tighter budgets and growing operational demands, Brown University is taking a pragmatic approach to AI by starting with high-value, rules-based processes where automation can deliver measurable results. Initial deployments in contract management and research administration have reduced contract queue times and cut Funding Opportunity Announcement review times from about an hour to just minutes. For Bethany Warburton, successful AI adoption is as much about organizational readiness as technology. By aligning stakeholders, understanding workflows, and expanding only after proving value, Brown is building a strong foundation for thoughtful, sustainable AI transformation.





AI-Native Leader: Spotlight on Bethany Warburton, Brown University Facing tighter budgets and growing operational demands, Brown University is taking a pragmatic approach to AI by starting with high-value, rules-based processes where automation can deliver measurable results. Initial deployments in contract management and research administration have reduced contract queue times and cut Funding Opportunity Announcement review times from about an hour to just minutes. For Bethany Warburton, successful AI adoption is as much about organizational readiness as technology. By aligning stakeholders, understanding workflows, and expanding only after proving value, Brown is building a strong foundation for thoughtful, sustainable AI transformation.

As GreyOrange expanded globally, the challenge wasn’t simply connecting systems—it was eliminating the manual coordination slowing critical operations. Using UnifyApps, the company built an AI-powered operational foundation that automates its most time-sensitive workflows. Today, when a Sev-1 incident occurs, bridge calls are launched automatically, conversations are transcribed in real time, summaries are written into tickets, resolver teams are engaged intelligently, and escalations happen without human intervention. The result is dramatically faster response times, improved mean time to resolution, and engineering teams that spend less time coordinating and more time solving problems. For GreyOrange, the biggest lesson is that enterprise AI creates lasting value not by generating insights alone, but by orchestrating systems, workflows, and people into a single autonomous operational loop.

Building an AI-Native enterprise starts with the foundation. For Belcorp, that meant connecting data, workflows, and governance across 14 countries, three brands, and more than one million beauty consultants before scaling AI across the business. Today, AI powers everything from consultant experiences and intelligent automation to agentic workflows across core business functions—demonstrating that lasting AI transformation depends as much on the operating foundation as it does on the models themselves.

Most AI governance frameworks look solid on paper. They have committees, approval flows, risk registers, and carefully worded policies. And yet, when AI systems move into production—embedded in workflows, triggering actions, making decisions—the same organizations are surprised by failures that feel both obvious and hard to diagnose. The problem isn’t a lack of rigor. It’s that most governance models are inherited from a world where software was static, behavior was predictable, and humans were always present at the point of action. AI breaks those assumptions. What follows are seven governance gaps that show up repeatedly once AI is allowed to operate continuously inside the enterprise.

Across retail branches, corporate deal teams, private wealth advisors, and commercial relationship managers, banks have invested billions in core platforms, channels, and compliance tooling. Yet most critical workflows—onboarding, underwriting, servicing, monitoring—are still document-heavy, manually reviewed, and fragmented across systems. The result is predictable: slow cycle times, rising compliance burden, duplicated effort, and limited visibility across the client lifecycle.

The problem with enterprise AI isn’t intelligence. It’s architecture

Enterprises have invested heavily in data infrastructure for years. Data lakes, data warehouses, vector databases, RAG pipelines. There has been no shortage of effort, or money, or genuine technical progress. And yet AI agents keep contradicting each other. They hallucinate on questions that should be easy. They require more human correction than anyone budgeted for, on decisions that were supposed to be routine. The issue is not that AI can’t access enterprise data. Most modern systems can query across dozens of applications. The issue is that access and understanding are not the same thing. And in the enterprise, that distinction is where intelligent systems succeed or quietly fall apart.

Single-team automation is where enterprise AI earns its early wins. A finance team automates invoice matching. An operations team automates ticket routing. An HR team automates onboarding emails. The scope is tight, the data mostly lives in one system, the incentives align, and the approvals are predictable.

Manufacturing performance depends on workforce precision: the right skills, in the right plants, at the right time. Yet hiring, workforce planning, compliance, and learning are often manual, fragmented, and reactive. AI-Native HR turns workforce management into a predictive, continuously optimized system. In the rush to deliver value, teams collapse too many responsibilities into a single artifact. The agent defines the workflow, embeds governance decisions, controls access, and shapes the user experience. Each new agent becomes a bespoke system. That approach feels fast at first, but it recreates a familiar failure mode: logic duplication, brittle change, and escalating coordination cost. We’ve seen this before. Early digital systems bundled data, logic, interfaces, and controls into monoliths. They worked—until scale made change painful. The industry eventually learned to separate concerns. AI-Native systems demand the same discipline, but many organizations haven’t applied it yet.

The root cause isn’t that agents are inherently hard to manage. It’s that most enterprises are building them backwards. In the rush to deliver value, teams collapse too many responsibilities into a single artifact. The agent defines the workflow, embeds governance decisions, controls access, and shapes the user experience. Each new agent becomes a bespoke system. That approach feels fast at first, but it recreates a familiar failure mode: logic duplication, brittle change, and escalating coordination cost. We’ve seen this before. Early digital systems bundled data, logic, interfaces, and controls into monoliths. They worked—until scale made change painful. The industry eventually learned to separate concerns. AI-Native systems demand the same discipline, but many organizations haven’t applied it yet.