For years, business demand has arrived in Digital as a queue. A team needs a report, a workflow, an integration, or a system change. Digital translates the requirement, finds capacity, navigates architecture and security, and eventually delivers something.
That model created control, but it also created a bottleneck. Productivity improvement became constrained by the number of people available to interpret and build every request.
I no longer think the business should have to wait for IT in the same way.
This is not an argument for removing Digital or allowing uncontrolled development. It is an argument for changing where Digital creates value. As AI makes software and automation more accessible, the business can take greater responsibility for describing its outcomes, processes, constraints, and tests. Digital can provide the environment that allows this to happen safely.
I see our future role moving upwards. Education and awareness will help people understand what AI can and cannot do. Business architecture will help teams codify work end to end rather than automate isolated fragments. Architecture and design will create reusable patterns. Governance and monitoring will continue after deployment, rather than appearing only at an approval gate. Developers will apply engineering judgement to security, integration, performance, model choice and cost.
Cyber also needs to broaden into AI safety. Malicious attacks remain critical, but not every serious AI failure begins with an attacker. A model may be wrong, an agent may have excessive authority, two systems may interact in an unexpected way, or a plausible output may pass through a weak human check. Digital Trust must consider intentional and unintentional harm.
The biggest shift is from reactive to proactive. Instead of waiting for a request, Digital can work with value streams to identify constraints, understand process performance, and create the scaffolding for continuous improvement.
This should also unlock more value from our technical people. Skilled developers should not spend their best hours translating every requirement into routine code. Their judgement is more valuable when setting standards, reviewing generated capability, and solving problems where architecture genuinely matters.
The future Digital function may build less of everything itself. But it will carry greater responsibility for making sure the whole organisation can build, change, and learn safely. That is not a smaller role. It is a more strategic one.