Closing the AI Execution Gap: The Next CEO Mandate
- Vivienne Wei
- Dec 27, 2025
- 3 min read
Your board has seen your AI demos. They’ve approved the pilots. And now they’re asking: where’s the impact?
For most companies, there is little business impact. An MIT study found that 95% of enterprise GenAI pilots so far have failed because they haven't moved the P&L needle. Healthcare research echoes the same: only 30% of pilots ever make it into production. Boards are frustrated. Executives are fatigued.
But this isn’t collapse; it’s correction. The “toy phase” of AI is ending. The exploration was necessary, but the results prove what many CEOs already know: pilots don’t scale, and tools alone don’t transform.
Executives weren’t set up to succeed due to scattered pilots, vendor hype, and weak foundations made impact elusive. Their AI execution lacked four essentials:
Governance & Trust: Without explainability and guardrails, boards and regulators won’t buy in. Trust isn’t a brake; it’s a growth multiplier.
AI-Ready Data: Petabytes without unified context are chaos. Clean, connected data is the difference between theater and value.
Enterprise Strategy: Scattered pilots equal theater; orchestration drives scale.
Leadership Mindset: Vulnerability to admit unknowns, curiosity to experiment, and conviction to stay the course.
Ignore these, and AI stays stuck in the trough.
The Agentic Alternative
The future is not Generative. It’s Agentic.
Agentic AI shifts from passive text generation to active execution. Instead of demos, agents embed into workflows, execute tasks, and deliver measurable business outcomes. This is where transformation begins.
But it won’t happen by technology alone. The next frontier is the human + agent workforce.
Agent Managers: The leaders who refine, orchestrate, and scale AI agents. They combine functional expertise with new AI skills to translate abstract capability into business impact.
The Human Multiplier: Trust is the currency of the digital economy. An AI system that admits mistakes or responds empathetically strengthens relationships at scale. Efficiency alone is not advantage. Trust and empathy create loyalty.
Workforce Readiness: The World Economic Forum projects 59% of workers will need retraining by 2030; 40% of today’s skills will be obsolete. Leaders cannot outsource this challenge to HR. An Agentic Enterprise is only as strong as the adaptability of its people.
Agentic AI does more than just automate. It frees capacity for creativity, connection, and growth. Technology creates the possibility; people create the advantage.
How CEOs Close the Execution Gap
These case studies prove the pattern:
SharkNinja (Consumer Goods): Early agent failures gave way to faster service and lower costs once product knowledge was embedded.
Big Brothers Big Sisters of America (Nonprofit): Context-aware agents improved mentor matching and impact.
Formula 1 (Sports): Response times cut by 80%, creating real-time personalized fan support.
1-800Accountant (Financial Services): Built-in governance raised resolution rates to 70% without escalation.
At Salesforce, we saw the same lesson. Our CEO, Marc Benioff, didn’t just delegate AI to a task force. He leaned in significantly. Within days of review, our Help Agent went live, a move that was originally slated to take more than two months. Today, it resolves 85% of customer cases. Why was this initiative among the 5% that are successful? Same technology, same tools... and impactful leadership from the front.
We shared this initiative in our Harvard Business School case study.
What separates AI theater from transformation comes down to four imperatives:
Start with the Customer: Tie AI to outcomes like retention, growth, and satisfaction.
Meet Teams Where They Are: Embed AI into existing workflows; don’t force disruption.
Build on Trusted Platforms: Avoid DIY unless you are ready to invest heavily. Systems with unified data, compliance, and guardrails accelerate value.
Reimagine Roles, Not Just Reskill: Agents free time, but only redesigned roles unlock higher-value work.
A Leadership Roadmap: From Hype to Transformation
Four imperatives separate AI theater from Agentic Transformation:
Start with the Customer: Tie AI to outcomes like retention, growth, and satisfaction.
Meet Teams Where They Are: Embed AI into existing workflows; don’t force disruption.
Build on Trusted Platforms: Avoid DIY. Use systems with unified data, compliance, and guardrails.
Reimagine Roles, Not Just Reskill: Agents free time, but only redesigned roles unlock higher-value work.
The Executive Takeaway
Generative AI created demos. Agentic AI creates dividends.
The execution gap is a leadership one. Boards are no longer asking “Should we?” but “Where’s the value?”
Two questions matter most in your boardroom today:
If your competitor deploys agents at scale tomorrow, would you be ready?
Would your workforce know how to partner with those agents?
Comments