Riding the Tsunami: How CEOs Can Lead at the Speed of AI

If my last article “A New Kind of Company Is Emerging” described the shape of future organisations, then “Riding the Tsunami” examines how CEOs must operate within that future, not at some distant horizon, but today.

I hope it’s obvious by now that we are not entering a slow transition into a new era of business. We are being swept forward by forces that are tectonic in nature and will affect each and every one of us regardless of whether we like it or not. The wave driving this transformation is agency-driven artificial intelligence (Agentic AI) and its effect is to make time itself a central axis of competitive advantage for any organisation.

In my lifetime, I’ve lived through several global business transformations such as the development and rise of the Internet. During these times, leaders introduced digital tools to improve communication, automate routine tasks and reduce costs. But today, maybe for the first time, technology is not merely optimising work and making us more efficient, it’s reshaping the actual nature of work and how we as humans perform that work. 

Many of the CEOs I work with such as Matthew Scullion, CEO of Matillion, are driving their organisations to redefine what work gets done, when it gets done and how it gets done. In this environment, speed is more than a competitive edge; it is a strategic necessity. The true constraint for CEOs is no longer capital, talent or even strategy, but the latency between decision and impact. Everything else becomes secondary.

How you will succeed in this new environment is not by simply acting as an operational manager: You will become what I call a “CEO Orchestrator”, a conductor of an ensemble of both human and machine agents operating asynchronously, autonomously and at scale. These agents are not simple tools, but autonomous actors capable of sensing context, acting independently, coordinating with other agents and delivering outcomes with minimal human direction. To lead at this speed, you will need to develop the skills of building and deploying agents, optimize workflows as well as how to evaluate results in real time. This requires a distinct leadership skill not found in traditional management texts: agent orchestration.

Competitive advantage now belongs to those who can compress workflows. Reducing processes and eliminating handoffs that once took weeks down to hours, collapsing iteration cycles from months to minutes and responding to changes almost as they occur. As a CEO I spoke to early this week stated “This is not merely a productivity improvement; it is a fundamental redefinition of value creation.”.

So in order to lead effectively, we must actively eliminate all sources of latency. We must reduce delays in decision-making, communication, execution and learning. Whenever lag exists, opportunity emerges for competitors.

Real-World Example: AI in Sales Workflows

One concrete example of this shift is visible in how organisations are transforming outbound sales functions. In early 2025 SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin publicly shared that his company replaced nearly its entire outbound sales team with AI agents.

After two senior sales representatives unexpectedly left the company, Lemkin decided not to rehire but instead to expand the use of autonomous AI agents trained on the workflows and playbooks of the organisation’s top performers. 

By mid-year, approximately 20 autonomous agents, supervised by just 1.2 human staff, were handling tasks previously carried out by a 10-person SDR (Sales Development Representative) and AE (account executive team), maintaining revenue and scaling outreach more consistently than the prior human team could.  

This shift reflects a broader trend in which AI-powered agents automate lead qualification, personalised outreach, follow-ups and meeting scheduling. They can do so around the clock without fatigue, churn or salary constraints. In doing so, these agentic workflows compress large portions of the sales cycle, allowing human teams to focus on complex negotiation, relationship building and strategic account management.

Real-World Example: AI in Software Engineering

At Matillion, AI agents are also reshaping how software engineering work gets done. Unlike earlier automation tools that simply assisted programmers, modern agentic systems can plan tasks, generate and refactor code, execute tests and even manage deployment pipelines. In multi-agent frameworks, one agent may interpret high-level project requirements and decompose them into detailed tasks, a second agent may generate and optimize code, a third may automatically run tests and fix issues and a fourth agent may review and validate the final output.  

Developers at Matillion now spend less time on repetitive tasks and more on creative problem solving, architecture decisions and high-leverage work that fundamentally advances their data engineering “buddy” product called Maia. This kind of workflow compression accelerates development cycles while maintaining quality and enabling smaller teams to deliver more than previously imaginable.

What This Means Practically

Our traditional long planning cycles and periodic reviews are now liabilities. Our decisions must now be informed by continuous feedback and our organisations must adapt with fluidity. Well-designed “light weight” agentic processes outperform larger but slower ones. Talent must combine domain expertise with fluency in supervising autonomous agents, this is why one of your key tasks as a leader  is creating and maintaining a highly talent dense organization capable of rapidly adapting to these tectonic shifts. 

I urge you to embrace these changes, even if they feel uncomfortable or unfamiliar at first. There’s an old saying “Fortune favors the brave” a translation of the Latin proverb “fortes fortuna adiuvat” that was used in ancient times to emphasise the rewards that come to those who take bold action rather than wait on the sidelines. In the context of leadership today, this doesn’t mean acting recklessly; it means being willing to step into uncertainty and design your organisation to operate at the speed of AI rather than cling to outdated patterns that slow you down. Courage, the willingness to face discomfort and take decisive action, will increasingly distinguish the leaders who shape the future from those who are shaped by it.

Here are three questions for you to further reflect on:

1. Where are the biggest sources of latency in your organisation, and how could they be compressed or eliminated through agentic workflows?

   
   

2. Which legacy assumptions are making your processes rigid rather than adaptive?

   
   

3. How are you evolving your leadership practice to orchestrate humans and autonomous agents together toward higher-order outcomes?

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash