Beyond the HelpDesk Ticket: Forging a Strategic AI Partnership With IT

I’ve been in the learning and technology space for many years. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned from countless enterprise projects, it’s this: Technology rollouts are easy; people and process change is hard. This has never been truer than with AI.

Earlier in my career, I watched a global platform rollout crumble. Why? Because the shiny new tool didn’t sync with the company’s legacy HR systems. We spent months creating workarounds, none of which were truly scalable. Now, I tell my clients that every system you ignore in planning will haunt you at launch.

For talent development leaders, this is a critical moment. Successfully implementing AI isn’t about just picking a tool. It requires a deep, strategic partnership with your IT department from day one. The old model of simply sending a request to the IT help desk and waiting for a solution is broken. For AI to succeed, we must move from being a service requester to a strategic co-owner.

The Blueprint for Your IT Partnership

You must show you understand the technical landscape to get genuine buy-in from your CIO or CTO. It is not about becoming an IT expert. It is about creating a shared understanding that bridges your team and your technology partners. Please consider this the blueprint for your conversation with IT, ensuring you speak the same language and anticipate needs before they become roadblocks.

Here are the core principles to discuss with your IT partners to build a scalable, secure, and integrated AI ecosystem.

1. Prioritize a Unified Data Strategy

AI models are only as good as the data they are trained on. A fragmented or low-quality data landscape is the most significant technical barrier to success. Before looking at a vendor, you must partner with IT to ensure your data is clean, accessible, and governed by a clear strategy. You need to know where critical information, like learning histories and performance metrics, lives and how they will be accessed. Without this, even the best AI tool will deliver flawed results.

2. Make the “Build vs. Buy vs. Assemble” Decision Deliberately

There is no single correct answer here, but you must have a clear rationale for your approach.

• Build: Only consider building a custom AI model if your use case is so unique that no market solution exists, and you have the deep, in-house technical talent to support it. This is a high-cost, high-risk path.

• Buy: This is the most common approach. You purchase a vendor solution that handles a specific business problem. The key here is rigorous vendor evaluation focusing on solutions that offer robust integration with your existing systems.

• Assemble: This is a hybrid approach where you use a platform (like Microsoft Azure AI or Google Cloud AI) to assemble solutions using pre-built models and services. This offers more flexibility but requires more technical expertise to manage.

3. Design for Interoperability From Day One

Your AI tools cannot operate in a silo. A solution that does not integrate with your core systems, like your learning management system (LMS) or human resource information System (HRIS), is a dead end.

You must insist on vendors that provide a well-documented Application Programming Interface (API). An API is a set of rules that allows different software applications to communicate with each other. Your IT partners must be involved in vetting this from the start to confirm compatibility and avoid costly integration issues later.

4. Default to a Secure, Private Environment

Using public AI tools for proprietary work is a significant security risk. For any initiative that touches sensitive employee or company data, your architectural principle must be to use a secure model deployed behind the enterprise firewall or on a private cloud. This is a non-negotiable point for your IT security and legal stakeholders. It demonstrates a commitment to protecting the organization’s most valuable assets.

Putting the Partnership Into Practice

A blueprint is essential, but it only works if you have a strong relationship with the builders. To avoid friction and ensure a smooth execution, you must move beyond simply consulting IT and actively empower them as co-owners of the initiative. This builds trust and transforms the relationship from a transactional one to a genuine strategic partnership.

Here is how you can engage your IT team throughout the process:

• Early and Continuous Involvement: Bring your IT partners into the conversation during the initial needs analysis, not just when it is time to implement. Their early insights into technical feasibility and infrastructure can shape a more realistic and successful project from day one.

• Co-ownership of Milestones: Treat IT as co-owners of critical project milestones. This includes joint sign-off on the vendor security review and shared responsibility for the pilot program’s technical success.

• Regular, Structured Checkpoints: Establish a predictable communication rhythm, such as bi-weekly technical syncs during the pilot phase. This ensures alignment and prevents last-minute surprises.

• Shared Decision Making on Vendors: The final decision on a technology vendor must be joint. Your team owns the business and user requirements. In contrast, the IT team owns the verdict on technical viability, security, and integration.

• A Joint Communication Plan: Partner with IT to craft communications to end-users about technical aspects of the project. Messages about system requirements or data security protocols should come from TD and IT, presenting a unified, credible front to the organization.

Your leadership is essential for making this partnership work. Even the most cutting-edge technology needs a human touch to succeed. You are not just managing a project by building a strong, collaborative relationship with IT. You are building a core competency that will be essential for every technology initiative to come. This is how you move from reacting to the AI revolution to actively leading it within your organization.

If you seek the skills, frameworks, and tools to help build AI literacy across your organization, join me for the AI for Talent Development Workshop offered through ATD.

Building a strong partnership with IT is not just a concept but a skill. This workshop provides hands-on practice to make that collaboration a success. You will learn how to manage AI vendors effectively, discuss use cases with key stakeholders like your IT partners, and navigate the critical ethical, legal, and governance considerations that are the foundation of a successful joint initiative. We also cover risk identification and mitigation strategies, equipping you to have more productive, strategic conversations with your technical counterparts.