.png)
Lucent Search research | AI & Data Leadership Report 2025–2026
Structuring AI and data teams for delivery
Does the way your team is organised support what the business expects it to achieve?
An AI or data team’s effectiveness depends on its capabilities, responsibilities and relationships with the wider organisation.
The structure needs to support the work: understanding business problems, developing solutions, integrating them into operations and maintaining performance. It also needs to establish how priorities are set and how people with different expertise work together.
Lucent’s research describes teams operating at different scales and across different geographies. For executive teams, this raises a practical question: does the organisation have the right combination of capability and coordination for its priorities?
RESEARCH FINDINGS
What the research found
Team sizes varied substantially
Respondents reported leading teams ranging from small functions to large departments.
This provides context for the different environments in which AI and data leaders work. A leader building initial capability faces a different organisational task from someone responsible for an established function with several management layers.
The survey does not establish an ideal team size or demonstrate that larger teams deliver better results.
Teams operated across different geographies
The report describes both teams concentrated in one country or region and teams distributed across multiple regions.
Location is therefore one dimension of the leadership requirement. Where people work across different locations, leaders need to consider coordination, access to business stakeholders and how responsibilities are shared.
Geographic distribution alone does not establish how a team is organised or how effectively it performs.
The report describes a mix of specialist and business facing capabilities
The discussion identifies contributions from data science, engineering, analytics, product and project management, alongside business knowledge and communication.
The survey did not collect a complete breakdown of roles within every team. These observations provide context for capability planning, rather than a benchmark staffing model.
BUSINESS IMPLICATIONS
What this means for the business
A team can have substantial expertise while still lacking a capability needed at a critical point in delivery.
It may be able to develop models but depend on an engineering team with limited capacity to deploy them. It may understand the technology while lacking access to the operational knowledge needed to make a solution useful. It may support several business units without a clear way to resolve competing requests.
These dependencies matter when deciding whether to recruit, reorganise or invest in development.
Adding headcount can address a capacity gap. Where the constraint involves unclear priorities, missing responsibilities or difficult handovers, the structure itself may need attention.
The leadership task is to understand how work moves through the organisation and where the team needs direct capability, reliable support or closer involvement from the business.
DELIVERY
Rebecca’s perspective: start with the work the team must deliver
I would begin with the business priorities and trace the work required to achieve them.
What needs to be understood, built, integrated, adopted and maintained? Which capabilities already exist? Where will the team depend on others?
Those answers provide a basis for deciding where people should sit, how they should be managed and what the senior leader needs to own.
I would examine four areas.
The balance between shared capability and business proximity
Some capabilities may serve several parts of the organisation, including common platforms, specialist engineering and shared standards. Other work may require sustained involvement with a particular business function.
Decide which responsibilities benefit from being held centrally and which need to sit close to operational decisions.
Where the organisation combines these arrangements, make the relationship explicit: who sets priorities, who manages the people and who assesses the business contribution?
Coverage across the delivery process
Examine the capabilities required from identifying an opportunity through to ongoing operation.
This may include business analysis, data preparation, development, engineering, assurance, adoption and support. The appropriate mix depends on the work the organisation intends to undertake.
Identify where responsibilities are uncovered or depend on people whose capacity has not been agreed. That helps distinguish a hiring requirement from a coordination problem.
Management capacity and specialist development
Consider how work is supervised and how people develop.
A senior leader may need managers who can coordinate delivery, develop specialists and maintain relationships with business stakeholders. Team growth can change that requirement.
Career paths also deserve attention. Some specialists will want deeper technical responsibility; others will want to manage people or take broader business roles. The structure should make those routes understandable.
Coordination across locations and functions
Define how distributed colleagues will make decisions, share knowledge and maintain continuity.
Consider access to operational teams, the timing of handovers, management responsibilities and opportunities to resolve problems together.
Location decisions should reflect both access to capability and the practical requirements of delivery.
LEADERSHIP QUESTIONS
Questions for your leadership team
Use these questions when reviewing an existing function or planning its next phase.
What work must the team deliver?
Are its responsibilities connected to specific business priorities?
Where are the capability gaps?
Which stages of delivery depend on expertise or capacity that has not been secured?
Which capabilities should be shared?
Where does the organisation need common platforms, standards or specialist support?
Where is close business involvement essential?
Do the relevant people have sufficient access to operational knowledge and decisions?
Can the management structure support the team?
Are supervision, development and coordination responsibilities realistic?
What should the senior leader own?
Is their remit clear across direct reports, shared resources and relationships with other functions?
HIRING IMPLICATIONS
What this means for a leadership appointment
The structure helps define the experience a senior appointment requires.
Building a small function may call for someone able to establish priorities, recruit foundational capability and work closely with delivery. Leading a larger department may require greater depth in management, delegation, portfolio decisions and coordination across business units.
A role spanning several regions may add responsibilities for developing managers, maintaining shared practices and working through different operating contexts.
Assessment should examine the relevance of a candidate’s experience to those requirements. Team size provides some context, but the more useful questions concern what they built or changed, how responsibilities were organised and what the business achieved.
Lucent’s Leadership Requirement Diagnostic examines existing capability, organisational relationships and delivery priorities before defining the role. This helps establish what the leader needs to inherit, what they need to build and the authority required to do so.
EXPLORE RESEARCH
Explore related findings
The skills AI and data teams need to deliver
The technical, commercial and organisational capabilities required across the team.
Hiring and retaining AI and data talent
The challenges of attracting, developing and keeping the people required.
AI ownership, accountability and executive sponsorship
How responsibilities and cross-functional commitments affect delivery.
ABOUT
About this research
This page draws on the team structures section of Lucent Search’s AI & Data Leadership Survey Results 2025–2026, covering team size, geographic distribution and the discussion of team capabilities.
The findings describe the participating leaders’ circumstances at the time of the survey. They do not establish a preferred organisational structure or staffing ratio.
CONNECT
Defining the leadership for your team’s next phase?
You may be establishing a function, reviewing an existing structure or deciding what a new leader needs to change.
Speak to Rebecca about the business priorities, the capability already available and where the team needs stronger leadership.
Lucent Search · AI & Data Leadership Report 2025–2026