A 2023 study found that 49% of CEOs believe a lack of AI proficiency will make them unprepared for the future of work. Frankly, that number should be a lot closer to 100%. AI isn’t just changing how companies operate, AI is changing the role of CEO. Leaders who treat AI as anything other than revolutionary risk falling behind quickly.
In my experience as CEO of a technology consulting company navigating rapid AI transformation, AI has been equal parts challenging and energizing. It has forced me to rethink and relearn a lot of what I thought I knew about leading a company.
Many leaders already use AI in basic ways: summarizing information, researching competitors, generating briefings and searching enterprise knowledge. In that way, AI is like a second brain for CEOs.
But the bigger shift goes beyond productivity. AI is reshaping the CEO role itself. The job is becoming more cognitive, more demanding and ultimately more impactful.
In my experience, the AI era is changing the CEO role in several big ways: leaders must continuously unlearn old assumptions, personally own AI strategy, rethink business models, lead workforce reinvention, make decisions in partnership with AI and foster a rapid innovation mindset in the organization.
For CEOs, the hardest part of AI isn’t learning what’s new. It’s unlearning what used to be true.
Traditional sources of knowledge struggle to keep up. Books can be outdated by the time they’re published. Staying current requires constant learning through podcasts, essays and hands-on experimentation. I spend hours each week listening to credible sources like Andreessen Horowitz’s podcasts and trying new things with AI tools. CEOs must understand not only how AI affects their own operations, but also how it’s reshaping their customers’ industries.
For long-tenured CEOs especially, the biggest risk isn’t ignorance but rather outdated mental models. Highlights Education CEO Kent Johnson told me in an interview: “The biggest threat to us is the things I know I know—and needing to unlearn them as fast as I’m learning new ones.”
Johnson also emphasized the importance of experimentation. “With AI, you’ve got to get your hands dirty,” he said. “I’m constantly reminding myself to try things with AI. Sometimes it fails miserably, but I’m learning.”
AI is becoming a defining factor in how companies compete, how value is created, how work gets done and how companies differentiate themselves from competitors. In other words, while it’s tempting to treat AI as a technology initiative and hand it off to a CTO or chief AI officer, AI cannot be delegated.
The scale of investment reflects the urgency CEOs should feel around AI and strategy. According to a KPMG survey, 68% of executives plan to invest between $50 million and $250 million in generative AI within the next year.
At my company, Centric Consulting, AI reports directly to me, because it’s inseparable from business strategy. That means I’m responsible not only for the strategy but also for mobilizing the organization around it: ensuring our people are trained, driving adoption internally and embedding AI into the services we deliver to clients.
AI’s productivity gains are so significant that they will break traditional revenue models. In consulting, for example, the time-and-materials model becomes harder to sustain when AI dramatically accelerates delivery. Outcomes-based pricing becomes a better fit when outcomes instead of hours define the delivery.
For example, two years ago, my company took a chance and invested in building an agentic platform designed to accelerate app modernization initiatives by 10-20x. It took courage to continue investing, because at the time we couldn’t quite guarantee that it was going to pay off. But now it’s been a boon for our business—and has forced us to begin rethinking our fee structure.
In other words, AI will cannibalize part of your business whether you like it or not. The only real choice is whether you build the next model yourself or passively wait for the market to do it for you. That requires courage from CEOs. Leaders must be willing to disrupt today’s status quo in order to create tomorrow’s success.
Leading through a disruptive force like AI requires CEOs to guide employees through uncertainty. AI naturally raises questions about the future of work, but in my experience, when people get ahead of AI, their careers become more secure.
Research from IBM estimates that 31% of employees will need reskilling within the next three years as organizations adopt AI.
The CEO’s role is to set the tone and help people feel hopeful, not fearful: learning matters, experimentation is expected and failure is part of progress. Cultures that punish mistakes will stall. Cultures that reward curiosity will adapt.
Johnson sees the same dynamic in publishing and education, where AI enables entirely new forms of accessibility and personalization that were previously cost-prohibitive.
“The most interesting question isn’t how we do what we already do faster. It’s what we can now do that we couldn’t do before,” he said. “We’re in the business of helping caring adults build relationships with kids and help them learn. AI isn’t going to change the biology of how kids learn or bond with adults. While our end goal can’t be disrupted, everything about the process that we use to support our end goals can be disrupted.”
The pace of AI innovation means capabilities, risks and competitive dynamics shift constantly. This means that strategy planning can’t happen annually anymore.
At Centric Consulting, the leadership team revisits strategy almost monthly and spends far more time on scenario planning than in the past. What happens if software development becomes largely automated? What happens if predictions about a “SaaSpocalypse” reshape the software ecosystem? These are the kinds of future realities we try to anticipate and plan for.
AI allows CEOs to extend their thinking by drawing on vast amounts of information and analysis before boardroom decisions even begin.
For example, when you train models on your organization’s knowledge, including strategy documents, lessons learned retrospectives, leadership discussions and more, you create a tool that can deliver deep institutional knowledge in moments. As a result, you can start strategic conversations further downstream. You arrive at board and governance discussions and meetings with external experts better prepared.
As Johnson told me: “Because I’ve put in the right content and asked AI in the right way, I can take that output and bring it to a governance discussion and say, ‘here’s where we should start.’ The tools get us farther into the conversation faster.”
AI doesn’t replace boards, advisors, or teams, but rather helps those
groups arrive at higher-quality decisions, guided by a massive amount of data.
Research reinforces this shift. A 2025 study from Cornell University found that 93% of firms use AI for forecasting, customer insights, and decision support, with measurable improvements in organizational agility.
AI may be the first technology that forces CEOs to evolve as quickly as the technology itself. It’s reshaping the expectations placed on CEOs—how fast they learn, how they make decisions and how they reshape their organizations. For leaders willing to adapt, this is exciting. But it also demands curiosity and the courage to reinvent parts of the business before the market forces you to.
The CEOs who thrive in the AI era won’t just adopt the technology. They’ll reinvent their organizations around it.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com.
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