75% of CEOs believe a fellow CEO will be fired over a failed AI implementation. The pressure is real, but the pressure is not the problem. The problem is that most leadership teams were built for a world that no longer exists. 62% say their boards are actively demanding measurable AI outcomes. 56% admit their competitors have a stronger AI strategy than they do.
You have read these numbers before. But have you sat with what they actually mean for the people around you?
Here is what I see when I sit across from leaders right now. The pressure is real, but the pressure is not the problem. The problem is that most leadership teams were built for a world that no longer exists. Your leaders are talented. They brought the company to where it is today. But 2026 is not 2024. The expectations of what can be accomplished in an hour have changed beyond anything we have seen before. I explore this pressure in my keynote, Leading an Organisation on Empty
Consider this. Every employee in your organisation will soon work alongside AI agents. Not one assistant, but twenty or thirty. Every person on your team, multiplied by twenty. That changes everything. The volume of ideas, the speed of research, the depth of competitor analysis, the pace of decision-making. What used to take two weeks now takes minutes.
Now ask yourself: is each member of your leadership team ready for that? Not just ready to cope with it, but ready to leverage it? Do they have a strategic plan for what happens when every person reporting to them is suddenly capable of twenty times the output? Are they coming to you more often with new ideas, new models, new possibilities? Or are they still operating at the pace of last year?
If the answer is honest, it is uncomfortable. And that is precisely the point.
Before you look at your leadership team, look at yourself first. Are you the living example of what you expect from each of them? If not, that is where it starts. Not with a restructure, not with a consulting engagement that takes three months to produce a slide deck. It starts with one honest conversation. The kind of conversation where someone you trust looks you in the eye and tells you what your organisation cannot. It comes down to how culture changes from the top.
CEOs will be fired over failed AI Implementations
Every leader needs that voice. Not a vendor, not a framework. A person who has been in the room, who understands the pressure, and who will tell you the truth in three seconds rather than three months.
The uncertainty does not disappear. But it becomes manageable the moment you have someone to think alongside. And once you are there, your leadership team will see it, feel it, and follow it. That is how culture changes. Not from the bottom up, but from you.
If you are leading your organisation through this, I work with a small number of senior leaders each quarter through a 90-day strategic advisory engagement. We start with where you are, build a board-ready AI strategy, and align your leadership team around it. Learn more about how this works or reach out directly at thomas@anglero.com.
Thomas Anglero is a Strategic AI Advisor, keynote speaker and author of Intro to Artificial Intelligence. He has delivered over 450 keynotes across 30 countries for organisations including IBM, the WHO, the World Government Summit and the European Commission. He founded the IBM Watson AI Lab for Cancer at the Oslo Cancer Cluster and closed over $500 million in enterprise transformation deals as CTO and Chief Innovation Officer at Cognizant.