You Deployed AI; You Never Onboarded It

Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez is a leading expert in project management and strategy implementation, recognized by Thinkers50 with the prestigious award “Ideas into Practice.” He is the creator of concepts like The Project Economy and the Project Manifesto. He is author of Lead Successful Projects (2019, Penguin) The Project Revolution (2019, LID) and The Focused Organization (2012 Gower). He has been teaching project management for more than a decade to senior executives at Duke CE, Skolkovo, Solvay Business School, and Vlerick. Antonio has held executive PMO positions at PricewaterhouseCoopers, BNP Paribas, and GlaxoSmithKline. Former Chairman of the Project Management Institute, he is the co-founder of the Strategy Implementation Institute and the global movement Brightline.

  Artificial Intelligence  

Think about what happens when a person joins your project.

They get a role. A named manager. A scope of work. Somebody reads their first deliverable line by line and tells them what’s wrong with it. There is a probation period, and everybody knows what it’s for.

Now think about what happened when AI joined your project.

Somebody turned it on.

That’s the whole gap. And every failure downstream falls out of it.

Gartner predicts that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by the end of 2027—because of escalating costs, unclear business value, and inadequate risk controls.

Look hard at that list. Model capability isn’t on it.

The agents aren’t failing. The management around them is.

So let’s do the management. Not a strategy. Not a policy PDF. The same five things you already do for every human who joins your team, applied to the contributor you have been treating as a feature.

Week Zero: Write the Job Description

I call it the agent charter, and it fits on half a page.

What this agent may do. What it may never do. Which systems it can touch. What good output looks like. Who owns it—by name. And who can switch it off, on what evidence, without needing anyone’s permission.

By name is the load-bearing phrase. Not “the PMO.” Not “IT.” A person, with a face,…

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