My conversation with Cal Fussman on “Big Questions” began with one of the most unsettling questions of the AI era. Since then, warnings from inside the frontier labs have only intensified. That makes the question even more urgent: If AI is accelerating faster than our ability to understand it, what is our role in shaping what comes next? There was a moment last year that shook me. I was watching Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, talking…
Forbes: Stop Automating Your CRM, Start Orchestrating Your Business
My latest for Forbes explores why AI in customer service must evolve beyond mere cost-cutting to deliver intelligent, personal, and experiential journeys. The traditional CRM, once a siloed record system, is transforming into an orchestrated action hub, leveraging AI agents. However, a critical “platform problem” arises from disparate vendor agents, causing sprawl and inconsistent controls. The solution is a unified control plane, acting as a central nervous system to govern and coordinate all AI assets, ensuring accountability. This shift demands…
What CEOs Say About AI in Private and What That Means To Leadership
Originally published in Forbes AI is now firmly on CEO and board agendas. But many leadership teams are still asking the wrong questions. Recently, I led several workshops with roughly 100 CEOs and Chief Operators at a leadership conference in Arizona.The topic was AI. But the real conversation was leadership. These were honest conversations with operators who are under daily pressure to grow revenue, protect margins, improve customer experience, support stretched teams, open better organizations, retain talent and make faster…
AI Agents Won’t Transform Work Until Humans Trust the Work
I’m honored to be included in The Wharton Blueprint for AI Agent Adoption, a new report from Wharton Human-AI Research and Science Says that explores one of the most important questions facing every leader right now: if AI agents are becoming so capable, why aren’t more people ready to trust them with meaningful work? The answer isn’t just technical. It’s human. The report makes clear that agent adoption is moving from a technology challenge to a psychological one. People may…
Stop Asking What AI Will Do to Us and Start Asking What We Can Do With It that makes us stronger 💪🦾
AI has a leadership problem. For the last few years, people have been told that AI is coming for their jobs, their careers, even their relevance. Then we act surprised when people respond with fear, anger, or outright rejection. I recently joined my new friend Cal Fussman to talk about why I believe this is a leadership failure, and why we still have an opportunity to change the future. I shared a moment that changed my own thinking. After listening to…
DisrupTV: AI Is Changing Business, the Bigger Opportunity Is to Reinvent It
AI is moving quickly into every corner of the enterprise. But I think we’re still asking questions that are far too small for the moment. How do we automate more? How do we increase productivity? How do we reduce costs? I recently joined Ray Wang and Vala Afshar on DisrupTV with my Infinite co-author and ServiceNow Chief Innovation Officer Dave Wright to explore a much bigger question: What would you build if AI gave you the opportunity to rethink the…
Chief Executive: 5 AI Decisions Every CEO Must Own Before Agents Start Running The Business
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…
The AI Dilemma’s Innovator: Why AI Makes You Faster While Still Falling Behind
Every company is now asking some version of the same question…how do we use AI to become more efficient? It’s the right question. But it’s not the only question. If we use AI only to automate existing processes, reduce costs, and accelerate yesterday’s work, we may become faster versions of who we already were. That might improve productivity, but it won’t guarantee relevance. The bigger opportunity is to use AI to challenge the assumptions that define the business itself: what…
We Gave Technology Our Attention, Are We About to Give AI Our Minds?
It had to be the algorithm. After I received a note online from a friend who asked me why Dave Wright and I wrote the book Infinite “when no one is reading books anymore.” Shortly thereafter, I stumbled upon an article in The Atlantic that made me moue (had to look it up to describe the facial reaction I had to the headline), “The End of Reading is Here.” Then the next day, I posted a video that showcased the…
The AI-Powered Status Quo: AI Transformation is a Test of Leadership
At AI Week in Milan, I had the privilege of representing ServiceNow on a stage filled with people thinking seriously about the future of artificial intelligence. Rather than offer another tour of tools, trends, and predictions, I wanted to challenge the premise guiding much of today’s enterprise investment: that applying AI to the existing business is the same as transforming it. It isn’t. Most organizations are using AI to accelerate processes, automate tasks, increase output, and extract efficiencies from operating…