Walk into any tech event, and the pace of change is unmistakable. New AI startups, powered by GenAI and agentic innovation, are launching every week, each claiming to stretch what’s currently possible. The energy calls to mind the early cloud era—except that everything is happening faster.
The early days of the cloud saw a step change in technological speed as any team could spin up infrastructure in minutes and launch products ten times faster than it could before. With a flexible cost model and rapid-deployment infrastructure, the rise of cloud providers fueled a decade of software disruptions. Just as cloud capabilities transformed how developers and product leaders built software, generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI are transforming who can build it and how fast. Projects that once took hundreds of engineers to produce can now be created by one person and a handful (or an army) of AI agents.
This advance in technology is having a profound impact on how CIOs, CTOs, CDOs, and other digital leaders procure services and select partnerships. Emerging leaders are making the most of this rapidly evolving ecosystem, moving quickly and challenging established enterprises.
The tempo has changed. For the AI-native CxO layer, the advantage now lies in optimizing the use of AI tools to make fast, appropriate decisions. Organizations that can evaluate, pilot, and scale at market speed will outpace rivals that are still deciding by committee.
Augmenting How We Decide
No CIO, CTO, or CDO can manually keep up with the flood of new products, wrappers, and platforms that appear each month. But the same AI tools that are driving the accelerated tempo can help users manage it.
Leaders are already using GenAI to map the market itself. Models can summarize product categories or cluster vendors by capability. And AI can scan for and identify the latest capabilities in new model releases and supporting infrastructure. Automated scans free up time for the organization’s human workforce to pursue higher-value work—testing fit, automating workflows, and measuring results.
Today’s most forward-looking CIOs, CTOs, and CDOs are hands-on experimenters. They use AI to cut through the hype and noise and move swiftly from insight to action. Those who make this a daily habit can stay ahead in an accelerating market. In doing so, they also inspire their teams to follow suit, experimenting with what GenAI and agentic AI make possible.
Tech + Us: Harness the power of technology and AI
What to Value Now
In working with AI vendors to buy solutions, leaders must recognize that the old signs of a safe bet no longer hold. In the past, a vendor’s size, headcount, or long-standing history were evidence of stability and safety. But today, those indicators can just as easily point to inertia.
Today, technological progress is moving too fast for legacy data points to mean much. Instead, value is defined by adaptability. When evaluating key components of an organization’s AI tech stack, CIOs should focus on five critical dimensions:
- Modularity. Choose vendors that can easily swap their foundation models as leaders leapfrog one another—sometimes month to month. Avoid situations that lock your company into a single model or model family that may soon fall behind.
- Data Advantage. Favor vendors whose products integrate and help build competitive advantage—not those that overlook it or absorb it into their own platforms. Proprietary data and usage-based learning loops are the new moats.
- Workflow Transformation. Evaluate the degree to which the vendor’s solution truly transforms your organization’s workflows rather than just hardening its existing (and potentially outmoded) processes, as classic robotic process automation (RPA) often did.
- Time to Impact. Expect measurable results within a quarter, not a fiscal year that matches an old-school financial planning cycle. Apply the same standard to your entire end-to-end implementation—expect faster and better from vendors and from system integration/managed service partners.
- Contracting Flexibility. Keep terms short and commitments light to protect agility as the market inevitably shifts along the acceleration curve.
Each of these dimensions ties back to the same underlying principle: favor architectures and relationships that let you move. Flexibility is the new priority.
Operating at Compressed Speed
For CIOs, CTOs, and CDOs, decision making must move as quickly as AI itself. What once took an entire quarter or year must now happen within days or weeks.
To keep pace, they should move away from relying on committee decisions to procure services. Smaller teams with clear accountability move faster, and they should have authority to test, measure, and scale within defined guardrails. CIOs should standardize and streamline their approach to procurement and security so that they can avoid restarting approvals every cycle. They should also replace exhaustive vendor reviews with quick checkpoints and easy-to-evaluate metrics.
Talent must evolve, too. The people who thrive now are curious and flexible generalists—builders who learn new tech stacks quickly and can connect the dots across domains. CIOs should pair them with specialists as needed but design their core teams to balance breadth and depth.
Building a Better Decision System
CIOs often talk about operating models, but the next advantage may come from a decision model—a system that enables an organization to rapidly scan, evaluate, pilot, and scale new technology.
A strong decision model rests on three layers:
- Discovery—continuous, AI-assisted mapping of the market
- Evaluation—assessments based on simple criteria that emphasize adaptability and outcomes
- Execution—fast, measured experiments that scale, or stop, quickly
CIOs should treat their decision model as they would any other capability: designing it, automating it to the extent possible, and continuously improving it. In a market where no one can see over the horizon, flexibility and adaptability become a key source of competitive advantage.
Choosing Well When the Ground Won’t Stay Still
Every technology wave begins the same way—too many options, too few facts, and a sense that the world is tilting faster than anyone can adjust. The companies that navigate it best aren’t those that guess right; they’re the ones that learn fastest.
AI is fueling the next generation of disruptors. Some will fade but others will define the era. But all players should seize the opportunity to build enterprises that can make decisions at the same speed as the market itself.
