I interviewed 50 CEOs in the last few months. These leaders run companies in manufacturing, logistics, SaaS, and EdTech. I wanted to see how they’re actually using AI.
Here’s what I learned. The experimentation phase is over. These CEOs aren’t asking if they should use AI anymore. They’re building it into their companies right now. They’ve moved past simple chatbots into agentic workflows, decision science, and customer-facing products.
Here are the five ways they’re using AI right now.
1. Strategic Thought Partner
You may have heard that AI handles grunt work but can’t do strategy. That’s wrong.
Smart CEOs use AI as a devil’s advocate for high-stakes decisions. They upload strategy decks and financial data into secure environments. They pressure-test their thinking before they walk into the boardroom.
Philippe Bouissou, CEO of Blue Dots Partners, builds tools that challenge his judgment:
“We have the board presentation, strategic plan, financial data, CRM access. A CEO asks, ‘I have a board meeting next Friday. Here’s my deck. What are the three most difficult questions the board will ask me and how should I answer?’ The AI provokes the CEO’s thinking within the secured context of the company.”
2. Radicalizing Operational Efficiency
AI doesn’t save minutes anymore. It saves days.
CEOs are collapsing multi-day workflows into single clicks. This isn’t about writing emails. It’s about running entire business processes that used to require teams.
Ninh Tran, CEO of Gravity, transformed grant writing for nonprofits. What took 20 hours now takes one click:
“Even with AI tools, it still took people 6 to 20 hours per grant application. Now they just click a button, it’s done. We orchestrate different AI agents optimized for different sections – finding funding opportunities, summarizing your business, informing other agents about your credibility and competencies.”
3. Engineering Force Multiplication
In software, one person now does the work of ten.
CEOs aren’t using AI to write code snippets. They’re deploying virtual developers. A single human acts as an architect for a team of AI agents, multiplying output by an order of magnitude.
Jon Nordmark, CEO of Iterate.ai, described how his co-founder uses this:
“My co-founder sets all his prompts before he starts working in the morning. Then the 10 AI developers go to work – the CISO, the developers, the QA people he’s instructed through English language prompts. He does his day-to-day job, then comes back at day’s end and sees what these 10 virtual developers produced.”
4. Humanizing Customer Support at Scale
AI doesn’t just make customer service cheaper. It makes it better.
CEOs use AI to give customers immediate help when human volume is too high. They maintain high touch-points without burning out their staff.
Simon Goodall, CEO of Caribou, uses AI agents for coverage during peak times:
“We’ve got voice AI on the frontline to help customers when we’re not open or volumes are really high. AI agents step in and drive support. We’re using it across our organization, constantly experimenting and trying new things.”
5. Managing Complex Risk and Taxonomy
CEOs are applying AI to areas that require sophisticated judgment. Areas you thought were human-only territory.
Insurance companies train models on vast datasets. They achieve accuracy levels that rival or exceed human capability in categorizing risk.
Sam Hodges, CEO of Vouch, applies AI to complex taxonomy problems:
“How do we use AI for low-level client servicing tasks so humans don’t have to be involved at all?
How do we use AI to do risk taxonomization, which right now is mostly done through human judgment? We’ve built technology using applied LLMs that is extremely accurate and powerful around risk and hazard taxonomy.”
What This Means for You
The gap is widening. Fast.
Companies that treat AI as an experiment are falling behind companies that treat it as infrastructure. The CEOs who are winning view AI not just as a tool for efficiency, but as a way to reimagine their entire business model. From how code is written to how strategy is formulated.
The future belongs to leaders who experiment boldly. Leaders who integrate these intelligences into their operations.
The question isn’t whether you’ll do this. It’s when.
What will you do this week to move AI from experiment to operations?
