The CEO who is still standing in 2027, respected and in control of their company, will very likely be the one who ended their relationship with the advisers they trusted before AI changed what good advice actually required. Replacing a strategic AI advisor is rarely about the old adviser failing outright. It is about the job itself changing underneath the relationship.
Why does firing the old advisers happen at all?
It happens because advisers who served a company well before AI often cannot serve it as well after, through no particular fault of their own. The questions a board needs answered have changed faster than most existing advisory relationships have adapted. The pace of that change is measurable: the share of companies abandoning most of their AI initiatives before production jumped from 17% to 42% in a single year, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. An advisory relationship built for last year’s landscape is already behind this year’s failure rate.
What replaces the old relationship?
Usually, a faster and more honest AI strategy conversation, once the incentive to protect an existing engagement is removed from the room. A new advisor with no history to defend can say things the old one structurally could not.
How do you know it’s time to make the change?
When the advice you are getting stops changing even though the environment around you keeps changing, that stagnation is the signal. A strategic AI advisor whose recommendations look the same quarter after quarter has stopped doing the job, whatever the relationship’s history.
Read the full argument in The CEO Still Standing in 2027 Fired Their Old Partners, or return to the Strategic AI Advisor guide.
Thomas Anglero is a Strategic AI Advisor, keynote speaker and author of Intro to Artificial Intelligence. He advises boards on AI while running a company whose engineering team is AI agents rather than people. He has delivered over 450 keynotes across 30 countries for organizations including IBM, the WHO, the World Governments Summit and the European Commission.