Ep #33 The Head of AI Role Everyone Wants Doesn’t Report to IT

Most leaders assume they need to hire technical talent before their organization can move seriously on AI.

Wyatt Barnett runs AI at an 80-person trade association with no engineering staff and no CTO and he’s built more working AI capacity than most companies twice his size. The model is simpler and more replicable than you’d expect.

Wyatt Barnett is Head of AI (Technology Enablement) at the NCTA, the Internet and Television Association in Washington, D.C. In this conversation, Kevin and Wyatt get into the Tiger Team model Wyatt built from scratch ten cross-functional people embedded across departments, authorized to catch problems early, run experiments, and start solving things before they become formal requests.

They also cover tool selection for mid-market orgs, token cost management, why the AI engineering community is shifting focus from frontier models to the surrounding tooling ecosystem, and what Wyatt would tell a CEO who wants to build this kind of capacity with a blank slate.

Key topics covered:

✅ The Tiger Team model: how to build AI capacity without hiring engineers

✅ Why forward-deployed problem-catchers outperform centralized IT approaches

✅ Tool stack for mid-market orgs: Notion, Airtable, Claude, and what’s actually working

✅ Token cost management and the real budgetary risks of AI at scale

✅ What Wyatt observed at the AI Engineer World’s Fair and what it signals about where the industry is heading

Check out Wyatt’s Stuff:
→ Follow Wyatt on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/wyattbarnett/
→ The Zeitgeist Distilled
https://news.zeitgeistdistilled.com/