Asked a CMO one question last month.
He didn't answer.
Not because he didn't know.
Because no one had ever asked.
Clinical AI deployed.
Governance charter approved.
Vendor contracts signed.
Proof of work everywhere you looked.
The question was simple.
"If something goes wrong
with this deployment tomorrow,
who owns the call?"
Thirty seconds of silence.
He hadn't missed the answer.
He'd skipped the question entirely.
Most deploy before they can answer it.
The technology gets selected.
The system goes live.
The proof of concept piles up.
That is not a technology problem.
Not a data problem.
A governance problem.
And it is costing them.
Not in output.
Not in effort.
In the moment something goes wrong
and no one in the room can name who owns it.
The question was never about the technology.
It was always about the seat.
The Accountability Gap™ (TAG™) closes
when the Governance Owner and the Decision Owner
are named before the deployment goes live.
Not after the silence.
Someone could ask you that question right now.
The silence would answer first.
You already know which deployment it names.
Mo Johnson, MD MBA is a cardiothoracic surgeon and the founder of GPe Research. Field Notes are short dispatches from the clinical AI accountability frontier, published alongside the MedicoVigilance™ newsletter at medicovigilance.org.
Follow the work on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mo-johnson