In today's Cloud Wars Minute, I explain why success in the AI Economy demands bold, uncompromising leadership from CEOs — and why many aren’t ready.

Highlights

00:03 — It’s been fascinating to see that recently, AI transformation has begun to hit hard at the CEO rank. Up until now, as we’ve all seen, there have been hundreds of thousands of job losses that have taken place in lower-level or mid-level jobs. And I think now we’re starting to see that the new victims of AI are going to be CEOs.

00:25 — And I think we can put those into three categories: those who are unable to see what’s happening and deal with it, those who are unwilling to acknowledge the reality of what’s changing, and then there’s those who are unseeing. They choose not to see what’s going around them, or they’re not willing to recognize just how serious it is.

01:15 — But I think what we’re really starting to see now, and I’ll offer some tangible examples here, is this is going to come down to be a real issue for CEOs, because companies that want to succeed in the AI Economy will not be able to do so unless they’ve got full, unbridled, uncompromising leadership and support for the business transformations being wrapped around AI.

02:30 — By every measure, Doug McMillon, the CEO of Walmart, has been a terrific CEO. But late last year, when he announced that he was going to step down as CEO, he said, “I just don’t think I’m the right person for this job. We’ve started a lot of AI changes and transformations. I’m not sure I’m the right person to finish those. We need somebody who’s faster.”

03:20 — Now, another group here is the kind I’m calling the unwilling, and they are the ones that are big on, “Well, let’s have a committee. Let’s form a SWAT team. We’ll see what the threats are to our company. We’ll see what we need to do, and we’ll give them six months or nine months or a year, and they’ll report.” And by then, their company is sort of over the cliff and is not going to be able to make it.

04:08 — Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, said AI has become a convenient scapegoat for everything. He said there are a lot of CEOs right now who are just saying whatever happens, good, bad, indifferent, it’s all due to AI. “We had to make a lot of layoffs — that’s because of AI. We had to stop doing this — we had to stop doing that — well, it’s all because of AI.” He said that’s a cop-out.

04:55 — So for business leaders, you can smell this in your company. You can feel it. Are we a company that is bullish and going after this thing with AI, or are we going to be one of these people who are unwilling, unseeing, and just not ready to jump in? There are brutal times coming for companies that are not willing to get into this. It starts with the CEO.

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