Say, Say, Say
Sounds like a Michael Jackson and
Paul McCartney song.
It's speed against risk
59 percent say
that's the biggest AI governance challenge.
51 percent say
they don't have the authority
to govern it at all.
Deloitte CFO Signals.
200 finance chiefs.
Companies over a billion in revenue.
Second quarter 2026.
Read the second number again.
Not that governance is hard.
That they cannot do it.
The models are already running.
Credit decisions.
Forecasting.
Client suitability.
Portfolio construction.
Every one produces something
a person acts on.
Spent a career on the clinical side
of this same question.
The gap does not care
which building it sits in.
What 59 percent say.
↳ A challenge to be managed
↳ A balance to be struck
↳ Something better process fixes
What 51 percent say.
↳ A seat that was never created
↳ Authority nobody was given
↳ A model decision with no place to land
One is a problem you work harder at.
The other is a problem
no amount of work reaches.
43 percent say they cannot see
where AI is running
inside their own institution.
Which means somewhere in the firm
a financial AI model is shaping a client outcome
and nobody upstairs knows it.
That is not a visibility failure.
That is what an unassigned seat
looks like from the inside.
The Governance Owner names
what a financial AI system
is authorized to decide.
The Decision Owner holds
the call on the client in front of them.
The Handoff is where
authorization becomes a record
an examiner can read.
A CFO holds the budget.
A CRO holds the risk register.
A General Counsel holds the exposure.
None of those is the seat.
The Accountability Gap™ (TAG™)
does not open when governance gets hard.
It opens when governance
has nowhere to sit.
You already know whether that seat
exists in your firm
or just gets assumed.
That is not a governance challenge.
It is an empty seat
with a challenge written on it.
Which seat in your charter
holds the authority
your CFO just said they don't have?
Mo Johnson, MD MBA is a cardiothoracic surgeon and the founder of GPe Research. Field Notes are short dispatches from the financial AI accountability frontier, published alongside the FinVigilance™ newsletter at finvigilance.org
Follow the work on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mo-johnson