Via Chief Executive

We’re making the same decisions with AI. But for leaders who ask different questions, AI changes the assignment.

Dave Wright and Brian Solis share lessons for CEOs from their new book, Infinite: How Visionary Leaders Transform Today’s Businesses into AI-Forward Companies.

5 AI decisions every CEO must own before agents start running the business

For years, CEOs could delegate digital transformation. Digital transformation often lived somewhere between the CIO, the CDO, a transformation office and a series of platform modernization programs. The company bought new systems, migrated old processes, digitized workflows and measured progress in efficiency, speed, adoption and cost savings.

It was important work. But in hindsight, much of it wasn’t transformation. “Digital” didn’t really change as much as it optimized from the analog and disparate processes of yesteryear. So technically, those investments were more about digitization than “digital transformation.” We took the analog business and placed it online. We moved software and data to the cloud. We modernized departments. We optimized silos. We made yesterday’s company faster and more efficient.

We’re making the same decisions with AI. But for leaders who ask different questions, AI changes the assignment.

his is not digital transformation 2.0 now with AI. This is AI business reinvention.

AI agents don’t simply answer questions or summarize documents. They can, but where’s the transformation in that? Increasingly, they perceive, reason, decide, coordinate, transact and act across systems. They don’t respect org charts. They expose friction. They’re impeded by operational and data siloes. But, they learn from outcomes. They move through workflows. They connect disparate handoffs. They become teammates, operators, analysts, service representatives, software builders, compliance assistants and eventually autonomous participants in how the business runs.

That means the CEO can’t treat agents as another technology rollout. When agents begin running pieces of the business, they are also reshaping the business.

This is why AI is now a CEO-level design decision. The CEO’s job is to make the decisions only the CEO can make: what the company is becoming, where intelligence should compound, what humans must continue to own, how value will be measured and who has authority to redesign the work across silos.

Before AI agents are deployed the business, CEOs must own five decisions to set a course toward AI business transformation vs. automating yesteryear’s digitization.

1. Decide what AI is for before you decide where AI goes.

2. Decide which workflows matter most, and which ones are quietly wasting the company’s capacity.

3. Decide where agents can act, where humans must approve and where autonomy is off limits.

4. Decide how value will be measured beyond productivity.

5. Decide who owns end-to-end flow across silos.

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