The opportunity in front of you right now is unlike anything in the past 40 years of business. BCG surveyed more than 3,000 executives and found that 82% of CEOs are more optimistic about AI than they were a year ago. The reason is simple. AI is the first technology that acts as a multiplier of intellect, not just a tool. It lets a lean team punch far above its weight. It lets a fast-moving company outpace a slow-moving giant. Two-thirds of organizations report measurable gains in productivity and efficiency from AI already. The companies pulling ahead are not waiting for a perfect plan. They are moving now.
I have spent the past months interviewing CEOs across industries. Here is what the best of them are doing right now.
1. Rebuilding the IT Stack from the Ground Up
The old software model is dying. CEOs are replacing legacy systems with networks of AI agents that perform complex operations automatically. This is not an upgrade. It is a replacement. And for a company that moves fast, this is an advantage. You are not dragging along decades of technical debt.
Gamiel Gran put it plainly:
“We are on this revolutionary replacement of the current IT stack to what I call an AI first enterprise or the agent tech stack.”
Ask your technical lead this question: are we patching old systems or building new ones? If the answer is patching, you are already falling behind.
2. Making AI the Primary Builder
AI is no longer a coding assistant. It is the primary builder. The CEOs getting the best results have engineering teams using AI to write the majority of their code. The productivity gains are measured in millions. For a company where every dollar and every hour counts, this changes everything.
Premal Shah described the financial reality:
“If you look at it right now, 20 to 60% of all of our code internally is written by AI… you start to try to translate that into dollars saved, you’re starting to add up to millions of dollars.”
Ask your technical team this week: what percentage of our code is written by AI? If the answer is under 50%, find out why.
3. Automating the Routine to Protect the Human
The best CEOs are not using AI to eliminate people. They are using AI to free people for the work that matters. In a company where your team wears multiple hats, this is the difference between burning out and scaling up. AI handles repetitive tasks. Humans handle trust, judgment, and relationships.
Karthik Ganesh said it directly:
“We say we are tech enabled, AI powered, but human-delivered care.”
That formula works across every industry. Automate the repeatable. Protect the relationship.
4. Embedding AI Deep into Your Core Product
Bolting a chatbot onto your website is the weakest AI play. The strongest is rebuilding your core product with AI at the center: predictive, personalized, and anticipating what customers need before they ask. This is where a smaller, faster company beats a larger, slower one. You can make this move in months. A big company will take years.
Premal Shah’s team is doing this in healthcare:
“Integrating all these things, using AI to combine all these things and using the power of that. That’s what we’re really excited about – moving past what we’ve been doing for 40 years.”
Where does AI make your product fundamentally different? Answer that question in the next 30 days.
5. Measuring Outcomes, Not Activity
The most effective CEOs have no patience for dashboards that show AI usage. They want impact. Real ROI. Real speed. Real results for their customers. When resources are tight, every AI investment must earn its place.
Sam Lewis said it this way:
“I don’t care about vanity metrics or “Hey, we’re using AI to do this thing”. Instead, I want to know the outcome of this newly implemented activity.”
Define the outcome first. Then deploy AI to make it happen.
The Bottom Line
AI is the engine of scale right now. Not in five years. Now. You have an advantage that did not exist before. Speed and intelligence no longer belong only to companies with the biggest budgets. The CEOs who ruthlessly automate the routine, rebuild for an agent first world, and demand real outcomes will win. The others will be explaining to their boards how they have fallen behind their competitors.
