Free resource pack
Everyone wants an AI committee. Almost nobody writes down what it can decide.
The AI Champions Committee Resource Pack is a complete, ready-to-run programme for standing up AI governance and adoption inside a New Zealand organisation of 50 to 250 people. The mandate, the charter, the seats, the register, the tool framework, the policy and the training. You need a sponsor with authority, seven to nine people who will turn up, and ninety days.
The one decision that matters most
You are building two things, not one.
Conflating the committee with the network is the most common structural error, and it is the difference between a body that ships and a body that becomes the bottleneck. A 25 person group cannot make a timely decision. A network with approval rights becomes a shadow bureaucracy.
| The AI Champions Committee | The AI Champions Network | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Decide | Diffuse |
| Size | 7 to 9 seats | 2 to 3 percent of headcount |
| Selected by | Role, not personality | Peer nomination |
| Meets | Monthly, 90 minutes | Monthly, informal, 45 minutes |
| Authority | Approves tools, sets policy, tiers risk, owns the register | None. Zero approval rights |
| Time cost | 4 to 6 hours a month per member, 6 to 8 for the Chair | 2 to 4 hours a week, manager approved |
| Fails when | It has no written decision rights, or everything routes through it | It has no visible executive backing |
Citi's programme works precisely because its roughly 4,000 volunteer participants have no approval authority: the decisions sit elsewhere. A global financial services firm studied by MIT CISR routed everything through its AI review committees, took six months to approve low risk proposals, and watched shadow AI return until the board forced a redesign. MIT CISR, Minimum Viable Governance for Generative AI, 19 March 2026
What is inside
Twelve documents, in the order you need them.
Not a framework diagram. The artefacts you produce along the way, each one ready to fill in and take to your executive.
Stand it up.
Weeks one to three. The mandate, the charter and the seat map.
- 00Start here, and how to use the pack
- 01The Business Leader's Implementation Guide
- 02Terms of Reference and Charter Template
- 03Roles, Seats and the Champions Network
Run it.
Month two onward. The engine, and the rhythm that keeps it turning.
- 05AI Use Case Register and Prioritisation Playbook
- 06AI Tool Assessment and Approval Framework
- 07Drafting the AI Guidelines and Workplace AI Policy
- 10Operating Rhythm, Meeting Packs and Metrics
Ground it.
The induction reading, the capability build and the evidence.
- 04The Compliance and Standards Foundation
- 08Employee AI Training and Literacy Programme
- 09Selecting External Advisors and Service Providers
- 11Source Library and Verification Notes
And the parts you fill in come as their own files. A PDF is no use for an artefact you have to complete, so all twelve of them are extracted as editable documents: the Terms of Reference, the champion role description, the use case intake form and register schema, the scoring method, the tool assessment checklist, the tool decision record, the monthly meeting pack and dashboard, the quarterly board report, the incident report form, the guidelines outline and the policy sections. Square brackets mark what you replace.
The plan
The first ninety days.
One executive sponsor with real authority, a chair who is not the sponsor, and about half a day a week of coordination. Every stage ends in something you can put in front of your board.
Days 1 to 14
Mandate.
A written statement from the CEO naming the committee, its authority and its sponsor. One paragraph, containing the words "is authorised to approve". Then the four questions the sponsor answers before anything else happens.
Out: the mandate paragraph and a draft Terms of ReferenceDays 15 to 30
Seats and baseline.
Fill the seats by role, not by volunteer, because role based membership survives turnover. Then take a before picture: tool discovery, a five question anonymous pulse, and an honest governance inventory.
Out: signed Terms of Reference, seat map, baseline reportDays 31 to 60
First decisions.
Meeting one constitutes and tiers. Meeting two approves the first tools. A committee that approves nothing in its first two months loses credibility it will not recover. In parallel, draft the guidelines and nominate the network.
Out: approved tools list, guidelines draft, champions namedDays 61 to 90
Operate.
Publish the guidelines with a message from the sponsor, not from IT or Legal, and make it celebrate AI use rather than merely permit it. Run the first training. Triage the register down to three to five live use cases. Report to the board.
Out: guidelines live, training delivered, first board reportWhy now, in New Zealand
Adoption is high. Governance is not.
New Zealand has deliberately chosen not to legislate specifically for AI. That does not mean there is no obligation. It means the obligations arrive through the Privacy Act 2020, the Fair Trading Act 1986, the Human Rights Act 1993 and employment law, and nobody is going to hand you a checklist.
13%
of New Zealand companies had audit assurance or governance frameworks, while 66 percent were already using AI. Survey of 200 senior managers, August 2024, so treat it as directional rather than current.
Datacom State of AI Index →62%
of New Zealanders would stop using a service if they were concerned about how that organisation was using AI. Nationally representative, 1,001 people, fieldwork March 2026.
One NZ AI Trust Report 2026 →47%
of AI users were on personal, unmanaged accounts by October 2025, down from 78 percent a year earlier, as organisation managed adoption rose from 25 to 62 percent. Provision beats prohibition.
Netskope Cloud and Threat Report 2026 →3.5
use cases pursued at once by leading organisations, against 6.1 for everyone else, while anticipating 2.1 times the return. Survey of more than 1,800 C-suite executives. Fewer bets win.
BCG AI Radar 2025 →Before you start
How this goes wrong, and how you will know.
Every failure mode in the pack is documented, with the early warning signal that tells you it is happening. Six of the eleven are below.
No written decision rights.
Quorum, authority and escalation go into the Terms of Reference on day one.
Signal: someone asks "can we just approve this?" and nobody knowsEverything routes to the committee.
Three tier routing, with asynchronous review of simple intake forms.
Signal: low risk decisions creeping past two weeksGovernance with no sanctioned tool.
Banning tools does not reduce shadow AI. Providing better ones does.
Signal: personal account use stays flat or risesThe register dies at three months.
A named owner on every entry, a mandatory look back, and publish it internally.
Signal: no new entries, no closures, last update was month oneNo workflow redesign.
Redesign has the single biggest effect on financial impact, and about one organisation in five does it.
Signal: adoption high, hours saved high, nothing measurably changedThe committee is captured.
Role based seats, and a chair from the business rather than from IT.
Signal: every decision reflects one function's prioritiesGet the pack
Send it to me.
Tell us where to send it and the download starts on the next page. One ZIP: the pack as a branded PDF to read and forward, the twelve documents as editable files, and the templates. Yours to use and circulate inside your organisation.
If you would rather not run it alone
We can chair the first one.
The pack is deliberately complete: a sponsor, seven to nine seats and ninety days is enough to run the whole thing without buying anything. Where we help is the part that is hard from the inside. Facilitating the first session so it produces decisions rather than a discussion, running the register at pace, and training the network so it diffuses rather than dissolves. Document 09 tells you how to evaluate us, and everyone else, on the same criteria.
Where to next.
- Book an AI Chat and talk through your seat map
- Weekly AI Toolkit webinars, live and recorded
- The full resource and template library