A manager has always been accountable for three things. Time, people, and money. Delivery schedules, the team and the customers, and what the budget and the bonus pot actually reward.
That list is now two items short.
Processes and data belong on it. Most managers have not been told.
I have been arguing this for a while and getting pushback, mainly because my model does not match the ones the big enterprise software and consulting firms sell. My honest view is that they are a long way from the floor.
Here is why it has become acute rather than theoretical.
Every previous wave of business technology arrived through the front door. A vendor sold it in, the company rolled it out, somebody owned it, and it appeared on a register.
This one arrived through people's pockets.
Your team started using AI tools at home, because that is where the good ones landed first. Then they brought them to work, on personal subscriptions, funded out of their own discretionary spending rather than any budget you approved.
So there is now something in your business that somebody built.
You do not know what it does. It is not in any system you own. It never went near procurement, nobody wrote down how it works, and by this point other people depend on it.
When that person leaves, it leaves with them.
It was never yours.
I am not making an argument for banning anything. Banning it moves it further out of sight, and the capability is real.
The argument is that accountability has quietly shifted and nobody has redrawn the job. Who owns that process. Who owns the data going through it. Which of the things your team relies on every day actually belong to the business.
Those are manager questions now. They used to be somebody else's.
Ask them before somebody resigns rather than during the handover.
PS: We are in the gallery at Planet Ice in Milton Keynes this morning from 10am with a room of owners, on paper, nothing sold. lifestack sponsors Milton Keynes Lightning and together we are reviving the monthly Business Club. The next two are Friday 6 November and Friday 27 November: https://lifestack.studio/business-club