Room Talk · 18 min
Killing the Pilot Culture
A candid conversation with Meridian Bank's CIO on why she shut down the innovation lab — and what replaced it.
Key takeaways
- Pilots without an owner rarely reach production.
- Governance should be guardrails, not a monthly committee.
- The constraint on AI adoption is accountability, not technology.
Read the transcript
Host: You did something unusual — you shut down a working innovation lab. Why?
Priya Nair: Because it was working at the wrong thing. It was very good at producing demos and very bad at producing decisions.
Host: How did people react?
Priya Nair: Badly, at first. People had built their identity around experimentation. But once we attached every initiative to a real decision with an owner, the good work rose to the top on its own.
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