Get executive sponsorship

Executive sponsorship is essential to scale agents across an organization. A sponsor gives the Center of Excellence (CoE) the budget, authority, and credibility to enforce standards and drive change. Without executive sponsorship, the CoE has no mandate, and agent efforts stay isolated.

Why sponsorship matters

Scaling agents is an organizational change, not a technology project. It reallocates budget, redraws responsibilities, and asks teams to trust work that agents now execute. A CoE can design golden paths and release gates, but it can't compel adoption or resolve cross-team disputes on its own.

An executive sponsor supplies the three things the CoE can't grant itself:

• Budget. Sustained funding for people, platforms, and enablement, not a one-time pilot allocation.
• Authority. The mandate to set standards that teams across boundaries are expected to follow.
• Credibility. Visible senior backing that signals that the effort is real and here to stay.

Without sponsorship, the CoE can't enforce standards or drive change. Teams route around guardrails, shadow agents multiply, and the initiative stalls.

Get buy-in

Different stakeholders care about different outcomes, so frame the value for each audience:

• Executives are moved by cost and strategic impact: Lower operating cost, faster time to market, and competitive positioning.
• Managers are moved by time saved: Hours returned to their teams and fewer manual handoffs.
• Individuals are moved by the learning opportunity: New skills, less repetitive work, and a chance to shape how agents are used.

Address concerns directly rather than talking past them. People worry about job security, data safety, and reliability, and dismissing those worries erodes trust. Acknowledge them, show the guardrails, and be honest that culture change takes time. Adoption grows as people see agents work, not on the day the policy is announced.

What an executive sponsor does

A sponsor is an active participant, not a name on a slide. Expect the sponsor to:

• Set the vision and priorities: Define what agentic transformation should achieve and which efforts come first.
• Allocate staffing and funding: Commit the people and budget the CoE needs to operate and grow.
• Communicate critical announcements: Carry key messages to the organization with the weight of leadership.
• Make decisions: Resolve trade-offs on scope, risk, and investment that the CoE can't settle alone.
• Resolve resistance: Clear the cross-team blockers that operational teams have no authority to move.
• Support organizational change: Back structural moves such as creating or expanding the CoE.

The most powerful thing a sponsor does is champion adoption visibly by using agents themselves. When a leader runs part of their own work through agents and talks about it, credibility follows in a way no memo can match.

Identify a sponsor

Sponsors emerge in one of two ways:

• Top-down: A senior or C-level leader is nominated to advance agentic AI as an explicit part of their role.
• Bottom-up: A leader emerges from early success, championing an approach that already delivered results in their area.

Both paths work, but choose a sponsor with authority that reaches across organizational boundaries. A C-level sponsor can fund the CoE, set standards other units are expected to follow, and settle disputes between teams that a divisional leader can't. Aim as high as the effort's ambition requires.

Considerations

As you set up the relationship, keep a few principles in mind:

• Choose broad authority: Pick a sponsor whose mandate spans the units the CoE needs to influence, not just one function.
• Involve the sponsor in governance: Bring the sponsor into strategic governance decisions so standards carry real weight.
• Document responsibilities: Write down the sponsor's responsibilities and the expectations on both sides so the role survives changing priorities.
• Appoint a backup sponsor: Name a second senior leader who can step in so momentum doesn't depend on one person's calendar.
• Identify business advocates: Find an advocate in each business unit who translates the vision locally and feeds real needs back to the CoE.

Customer example

At The Estée Lauder Companies, executive sponsorship turned a data problem into a competitive advantage. Senior Vice President Raheel Khan framed the vision in business terms, asking how an 80-year-old company competes with agile startups and answering, "by using our intelligence." That leadership gave the work a clear strategic purpose, secured buy-in across a large, matrixed organization of nearly 25 brands, and set the ambition to build an "agentic world" for the company. The result was ConsumerIQ, a Copilot Studio agent that cut the time to surface consumer insights from weeks to minutes, supported by an upskilling culture that let employees build their own agents. A sponsor who connects agent work to strategy and champions it visibly is what moves an initiative from a promising pilot to a capability the business relies on.

Learn more: The Estée Lauder Companies and Microsoft Copilot Studio transform intelligence

Maturity of the sponsorship relationship

Sponsorship deepens as the CoE matures. Use these levels to see where you are and what to strengthen next.

Learn about the full framework in the Agentic AI adoption maturity model.

Next step

With executive sponsorship in place, define the vision, metrics, and goals that will guide your CoE's work.

Related information

• Agentic AI adoption maturity model
• Agentic transformation patterns