Business & Strategy · beginner · concept 299 of 311 · Updated Nov 4, 2026

🗂️AI Center of Excellence and Operating Model

An AI center of excellence (CoE) is a central team that sets standards, shares skills and governs AI use across an organization; its operating model is how it works with the business. Fully central teams become bottlenecks, fully local ones duplicate work and skip governance, so many firms go hub-and-spoke. Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework advises starting centralized, then moving the CoE to an advisory role that sets guardrails, not gates.