What Top CEOs Are Saying and Doing About AI

Gregg Metcalf
5 days ago
5 min read

Updated: 1 day ago

AI is a powerful tool. It’s moving some companies ahead, leaving others behind, and creating real harm where leaders don’t understand its impact.

The CEOs getting it right are doing three things:

Implementing AI where it creates leverage

Exposing where it introduces risk before it scales

Staying relentlessly engaged to maintain clarity as AI rapidly evolves

1. Implementing AI Where It Creates Leverage

The real question for leaders today isn’t whether to use AI. It’s where to use it in ways that actually move the business.

The CEOs who are ahead of the curve are not running pilots for their own sake. They’re tying AI to measurable outcomes and holding the organization accountable to them.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, talks about AI like an operating executive: where it improves productivity, where it accelerates execution, and, more importantly, where it delivers real value.

JPMorgan has pointed to billions of dollars in value already coming from AI-enabled applications across the business. On Bloomberg TV, describing the bank’s AI savings, Dimon said, “We know about $2 billion of actual cost savings, and I think it’s the tip of the iceberg.” He also noted that JPMorgan’s AI applications span risk, fraud, marketing, idea generation, and customer service.

That’s not speculative. That’s measurable. That’s leverage.

This is what it looks like when CEOs actually create leverage from AI:

They deploy AI where the outputs have clear economic impact.
They define success with metrics, not buzzwords.
They expect real results, not press releases.

That’s how leverage shows up, not in slide decks or hype, but in productivity that meaningfully shifts performance.

The CEOs getting it right treat AI not as a technology to adopt, but as a business tool to apply where it generates measurable outcomes.

2. Exposing Where AI Introduces Risk Before It Scales

The real fears CEOs have about AI are not theoretical. They are operational.

The concern is not whether AI is impressive. The concern is what happens when a powerful tool scales faster than an organization can control, explain, or unwind.

That is why serious leaders are focused on exposing risk early, before it scales.

1. Loss of control:

Arthur Mensch, CEO of Mistral AI, put it plainly at Davos: enterprises may say they are adopting AI quickly, but internally, “there’s a little more friction than that.” The reality is messy. AI spreads across teams faster than most organizations are structured to manage.

2. Loss of trust: Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, has warned that advanced AI is arriving with “almost unimaginable power,” and that it is unclear whether our systems have the maturity to wield it responsibly. CEOs understand what that means in practice: trust is fragile, and one scaled mistake can become a reputational problem overnight.

3. Loss of advantage: Jamie Dimon has said that “inertia has become an unforgivable sin” in an era where AI accelerates the pace of change. For CEOs, moving too slowly is its own risk. Competitors will not wait.

3. Staying Relentlessly Engaged to Maintain Clarity as AI Rapidly Evolves

The CEOs who are navigating AI well are not treating it as a one time rollout. They understand that this is not a tool you implement once and move on from. It is an operating shift that keeps evolving.

That is why the third pattern among serious leaders is simple: they stay relentlessly engaged.

Jamie Dimon, describing the real impact of AI on JPMorgan’s operations, said, “I think people shouldn’t put their head in the sand… It affects everything. It’s kind of the tip of the iceberg.” AI is not sitting in a corner of the organization. The bank invests heavily in it, measures its impact, and embeds it into core operations. That level of engagement is not about curiosity. It is about staying close enough to the work to know what is real, what is scalable, and what creates value.

Satya Nadella has taken a different but equally telling approach at Microsoft. He has reshaped leadership flow around AI, holding weekly meetings where senior managers are not even invited, so engineers and frontline builders can speak directly into strategy. That is a CEO ensuring clarity does not get filtered through hierarchy. Nadella has been clear about the standard AI must meet: “AI developers have to get to a point where we are using this to do something useful that changes the outcomes of people and communities and countries and industries. Otherwise, I don’t think this makes much sense.”

And at Shopify, CEO Tobi Lütke made the expectation explicit. Before teams can ask for more headcount, they must show why AI cannot do the work first. As Lütke put it, “Before asking for more headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.”

Whether or not every company adopts that stance, the point is clear: engaged CEOs are changing operating expectations, not just buying tools.

These leaders are not waiting for AI to settle down. They are learning in real time, adjusting in real time, and keeping their organizations aligned as the ground shifts. That is what it means to stay relentlessly engaged.

AI is moving too quickly for leadership at a distance. The CEOs who get it right are the ones who remain close enough to maintain clarity as it evolves.

AI is reshaping how companies operate, compete, and make decisions.

The CEOs getting it right are not treating AI as hype or experimentation. They are applying it where it creates leverage, exposing risk before it scales, and staying close enough to maintain clarity as it evolves.

We hear that AI is replacing us. When used well, perhaps it’s pushing us to engage more, think bigger, and operate better.

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Sources and References