“The CEO’s role has always been to lead through disruption. What AI changes is the velocity and consequences of leadership.” — Gary Cohn, IBM Vice Chairman

Congratulations. You are the new CEO. The promotion is real, the announcement has been made, and for a brief, clean moment, it feels like arrival. Then comes the briefing. The competitive landscape has shifted. A rival has deployed AI agents that have compressed their customer service costs by 60 percent. A well-funded startup has emerged from nowhere and is offering your core service at a fraction of the price, backed by automation you do not yet have. Your board wants a strategy. Your team wants direction. And somewhere between the celebration and the first all-hands, you realize that this might be the worst possible time to take the helm of most companies.

Except it is also the only time you have.

The Weight of the Seat

For decades, the first priority of an incoming CEO was to understand the business before touching it. Study the culture, read the financials, build relationships, then act. That conventional wisdom assumed a stable enough environment to support a transition period. AI has made that assumption dangerous.

The KPMG 2025 Global CEO Outlook, which surveyed more than 1,300 global leaders, found that CEO confidence in the global economy has hit a five-year low. The same report found that 71 percent of CEOs are reallocating budgets to AI over the next 12 months, not because it is exciting, but because they feel they have no choice. The business environment is not waiting for new leaders to settle in.

The fear is not abstract. You do not want to be the CEO who steered a viable company into irrelevance. That is a career-defining failure in a way that little else is. Founders who watched their companies dissolve under their watch do not typically get second chances at the same scale. The pressure is real, and it is right that it should be.

What Is Actually Happening to Companies Right Now

The casualties are not hypothetical. Humane, a hardware startup that raised $230 million on a compelling AI-first vision, was forced to shut down its flagship product in February 2025 after the product failed to deliver on its promise. The AI Pin was not beaten by a competitor. It was beaten by the gap between its vision and the reality of what the technology could actually do.

Larger companies are not immune. The share of enterprises abandoning the majority of their AI initiatives has jumped from 17 percent in 2024 to a staggering 42 percent in 2025. Nearly half of all AI proofs-of-concept are being scrapped before reaching production. These are not small experiments. In many cases, they represent significant capital, leadership attention, and organizational disruption — with nothing to show for it.

The companies dying slowly are not the ones making the wrong AI bets. Many are the ones making no bet at all, watching competitors compound advantages that will eventually become impossible to close.

Your Moat Is Probably Not What You Think It Is

Every incoming leader inherits a story about what makes the company defensible. The brand, the customer relationships, the technology, the data, the processes. In most cases, at least one of those assumptions needs to be revisited. McKinsey’s 2025 AI research found that 79 percent of organizations report competitors making similar AI investments, yet only 23 percent believe they are building sustainable advantages. Everyone is spending. Almost no one is building something that will hold.

The reason is that the wrong moats are being reinforced. As Insight Partners have noted, the conventional wisdom about software moats needs updating. Data moats, once considered impenetrable, are proving less durable than expected. The shift is from systems of record to systems of intelligence — and the companies that understand this distinction early are building advantages that compound. Those that do not are reinforcing walls that AI is quietly tunneling beneath.

For an incoming CEO, the practical question is: where does this company's real defensibility live, and is it the kind that AI strengthens or the kind that AI erodes? The answer will shape every decision that follows.

The Leadership Trap: Moving Too Fast and Too Slow

There is a trap that catches many new leaders who understand the urgency. They arrive, diagnose correctly that AI transformation is non-negotiable, and immediately launch aggressive initiatives. The pilots multiply. The announcements are bold. The organization becomes overwhelmed, execution suffers, and within eighteen months the board is having a different kind of conversation.

There is an equal and opposite trap. The leader who moves cautiously, demanding proof before commitment, waiting for the technology to stabilize. IBM’s 2025 CEO Study found that 61 percent of CEOs are actively adopting AI agents and preparing to implement them at scale. The executive who is still running pilots while competitors have moved to production is not being prudent. They are falling behind on a timeline that does not offer generous catch-up periods.

The answer is not a moderate pace. It is selective urgency. Identify the two or three areas where AI can compound competitive advantage fastest and commit to those with full organizational weight. Leave the rest for a second wave. Trying to transform everything simultaneously is how transformation fails.

What the CEO Chair Actually Requires Now

The World Economic Forum has argued that the CEO’s primary AI responsibility is not to become a technologist but to be declarative about where the company is headed and how AI will play a role in getting there. That distinction matters. The CEOs who survive this period are not necessarily the ones who understand AI most deeply. They are the ones who make the clearest decisions about what their company is for, and then align every AI initiative to serve that purpose.

That clarity is rarer than it sounds. The WEF also notes that change does not happen by memo. The companies emerging strongest from this period are building internal movements, not just strategies. That means recruiting internal champions, creating forums for employees to demonstrate wins, and building a culture where AI fluency is expected at every level — not just in the technology function.

There is also the question of what a CEO should stop doing. The leader who insists on personally approving AI tool selection, or who treats every AI initiative as a technology project rather than a business transformation, is creating a bottleneck that the pace of change cannot accommodate. Delegation with clear accountability is not a luxury here. It is structural.

The Only Acceptable Response to the Hot Seat

There is no version of this where the new CEO gets to watch from a comfortable distance. The companies with deep enough brand equity, diversified enough revenue, and strong enough balance sheets to absorb a slow transformation are rare. Apple can afford philosophical patience. Berkshire Hathaway has the portfolio depth to wait out disruption cycles. Most companies being led by most CEOs and founders do not have that buffer.

What they have is time, and only just. IBM Vice Chairman Gary Cohn’s words in the latest IBM CEO study are worth sitting with: “Decision cycles will compress. Boundaries between functions will dissolve. Advantage will accrue to those who can learn, adapt, and execute faster than their competitors.” That is not a prediction about the future. For most industries, it is a description of the present.

The incoming CEO who treats AI transformation as one item on a longer agenda is misreading the situation. It is the agenda. Everything else — culture, talent, product, capital allocation — needs to be evaluated through the lens of whether it accelerates or delays the company’s ability to compete in an environment where AI is the operating standard, not the differentiator.

The seat is hot. It has always been hot. What has changed is that the fire underneath it is no longer patient.

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