Eight days. That’s how long Google’s Advanced Technology External Advisory Council (ATEAC), an eight-member committee set up in 2019 to guide the company’s development of A.I., survived before the company dissolved it.

The committee imploded for several reasons. Google wanted the ATEAC to meet just four times a year. It expected its members to work pro bono. And although the digital giant claimed that the ATEAC’s efforts would inform its A.I. use, it wasn’t clear which projects the committee would monitor, to whom it would report, or which executive(s) would act on its recommendations. In retrospect, the ATEAC was consumed by the rising organizational and societal skepticism about its role because it simply wasn’t set up for success.

As CEOs expand their organizations’ uses of A.I., they face complex challenges. They find that they have to manage tradeoffs among objectives such as profits, consumer safety, reputation, ethics, and values that are often in conflict with one another. These tradeoffs force them to choose between making decisions that will have tangible short-term impacts and those with mid- to long-term implications that are difficult to evaluate.