AI Is Not an IT Project: Trustpair Appoints First Chief AI Officer to Scale Enterprise Adoption

WHY THIS MATTERS
As AI adoption accelerates across enterprises, many organisations are struggling to move beyond experimentation and pilot programmes into structured, company-wide deployment. Trustpair’s appointment of a Chief AI Officer reflects a growing recognition that successful AI adoption requires governance, leadership and cross-department alignment rather than simply deploying new tools. By formalising a company-wide AI governance model that integrates IT, operations and people functions, Trustpair aims to ensure AI initiatives are tied directly to measurable business outcomes while maintaining strong security and compliance standards.

As most enterprises struggle to move AI past the pilot stage, Trustpair, the leading vendor fraud prevention platform for global enterprises, is making a different bet: dedicated executive leadership. Today, the company announced the appointment of co-founder Simon Elcham as Chief AI Officer (CAIO) and the formalization of its companywide AI governance model. The newly created role elevates Elcham, co-founder and former CTO, to lead a structured, cross-functional AI strategy grounded in Trustpair’s core belief that technology alone cannot drive AI adoption. 

According to McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI report, nearly two-thirds of organizations have yet to scale AI across the enterprise, still stuck in experimentation and never achieving companywide adoption. For fast-growing companies, the risks can multiply: unmanaged AI leads to data security vulnerabilities, compliance gaps and organizational fragmentation, all of which become harder to address as the technology grows.

By bringing together technical leadership and people transformation under a unified framework from the outset, Trustpair has turned AI from a disconnected experiment into a measurable organizational asset.

“AI was already appearing organically across teams, but without shared practices, we were only capturing a fraction of what was possible,” said Baptiste Collot, CEO and co-founder of Trustpair. “Scaling AI isn’t about deploying more tools. It’s about aligning structure, security, and our people and culture around a common framework. Appointing Simon as Chief AI Officer is our commitment to making AI a permanent, companywide advantage, ensuring our teams are equipped, trained and engaged in this transformation.”

Simon Elcham, alongside Cyrille de la Brunetière, Chief Operations Officer and Céline Gallon, Chief People Officer, developed the “AI for teams” program, a structured governance model built to transform individual experimentation into institutional capability. The program is built on three pillars:

• Business outcomes first: Every AI initiative starts with a clearly defined business objective. Use cases are selected based on measurable operational impact, not trend adoption.
• Security and compliance by design: All tools are vetted against internal security standards and data protection requirements before deployment, with governance aligned to evolving regulatory expectations.
• Organizational adoption and accountability: AI champions embedded within each department drive consistent practices and knowledge sharing.

“Most companies treat AI as a software rollout,” said Simon Elcham. “But adoption stalls when it remains isolated within IT. AI impacts workflows, decision-making, compliance and culture, and it must be governed as an organizational discipline. Our model bridges technical leadership and people strategy from day one.”

Early results from Trustpair’s internal deployment reflect measurable productivity gains. In a post-launch survey, employees reported reducing research and information synthesis time by an estimated 40-50%, with half of all respondents indicating significant efficiency improvements in daily workflows. 

More importantly, AI usage shifted from informal experimentation to standardized practice, reducing shadow AI risks while improving quality control and oversight. As AI-driven fraud threats grow more sophisticated, Trustpair views internal AI governance as directly aligned with its broader mission: securing enterprise financial ecosystems with rigor and transparency.

Appointing a dedicated Chief AI Officer is emerging as the critical first step for enterprises looking to formalize executive ownership of AI governance and move beyond ad hoc adoption. As CAIO, Simon Elcham will lead Trustpair’s AI risk management framework, scale AI-enabled productivity across all business functions and build the internal systems that transform individual AI use into shared organizational capability. Trustpair believes this governance-first model will become standard for enterprises seeking to scale AI responsibly in highly regulated environments.

FF NEWS TAKE
Enterprises are learning that scaling AI successfully requires more than technology—it requires leadership and governance.

The creation of a Chief AI Officer role signals a broader shift as organisations move from AI experimentation to structured, enterprise-wide adoption. Companies that establish clear governance frameworks and align AI initiatives with business goals are likely to see stronger productivity gains while reducing the risks associated with unmanaged AI deployment.