Do you have FOMO that you’ve been missing out on all the “AI doomer” hot takes the past ten days?
Relax. Let me give you the TL;DR on the latest AI doomer hits making the rounds: agentic AI drives the marginal cost of labor toward zero, frontier platforms deploy all the agents, rebuild every existing company in the process, and ultimately capture 99% of the wealth. And what does that mean for the rest of us? Well, that part hasn’t been explained particularly well. You’d be forgiven for thinking the phrase of the year so far is “we’re all f***ed.”
It’s not just vibes. A widely-circulated post from Citrini Research sketched out a pretty bleak two-year horizon for the economy. Block’s CEO recently announced he was laying off nearly half the company because AI can efficiently replace so much human labor, and he said he felt late doing it. And finally, every software platform that’s embedded itself inside Fortune 500 companies suddenly finds itself needing to explain why it won’t just be replaced by vibe coders inside those same companies. No doubt about it, the doom is arriving in ear piercing shock waves. And it’s going to get louder.
No wonder it’s never felt harder to be a CEO.
If you’re a CEO right now, you likely feel the walls closing in on you: on one side, your team is quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) wondering whether their jobs will exist in six months. On the other side, your board (mostly capital allocators) wants to know why you’re not doing more with less. Good luck explaining a hiring plan for the back half of 2026.
During World War II, Britain’s populace embraced the phrase “Keep Calm and Carry On” to boost morale in their darkest hours. CEOs need their own morale-boosting phrase right now. I’d suggest: Be Positive and Stay Optimistic.
But before we get to “Be Postive and Stay Optimistic”, let me share a few other “Be” traits CEOs might consider embracing in the weeks, months, and years ahead to help them navigate their unenviable job.
Be Contemplative
Carve out dedicated time every week to process what’s happening and sketch out strategic pathways that your company or organization might consider. Too often in times like this, you can get lost trying to just see your next footstep in the fog. But you have to find a way to get above the clouds and chart a future that may require some dramatic changes. Build this contemplation into your executive team meetings, too. Think in 180-day increments and keep iterating. It’s the only way to navigate when the rate of change and dislocation feel so accelerated.
Be Focused
Come back to the vision, mission, and values that define your company. Clarity about what you deliver for customers is your best north star as AI reshapes everything around what you and your team are trying to accomplish. More than ever, now is the time to perhaps do less, but do it exceptionally well.
Be Vulnerable
What’s happening right now isn’t like the invention of electricity or the fourth industrial revolution. It’s not like anything history can aptly be applied to as a comparable. We are watching the proliferation of intelligence capabilities for which nobody has figured out the ramifications, no matter how eloquently they craft a science fiction description of what 2028 will look like. Practically speaking, it’s okay to say that out loud to your team, and to acknowledge that your organization is still figuring out how human intelligence and AI intelligence will co-exist. And it’s okay to acknowledge that your organization may not grow headcount the way it once did, or may even shrink. They already know this potential outcome is on the table.
Be Accessible
Your people have questions about what AI means for them and for the organization. Show up for those conversations. The void created by silence from leadership is filled in immediately with buckets of anxiety poured in by your team. Each conversation you comes with a multiplier effect given teammates talk and compare notes with each other. So speak with each individual in a way that acknowledges their personal perspective, but that is also consistent as if you were speaking to the entire organization at an all hands meeting.
Be Decisive
Even in uncertainty, execution matters, and making decisions that need to be made will separate the organizations that move forward from those that become laggards or roadkill. Once you’ve built your plan, move on it. But be excellent at identifying the successes (and the failures) that result from your decisions so you and your team can course correct and implement the important decisions that follow. Yes, people prefer stasis and they hate ‘context switching’, but unfortunately those concepts largely disappeared as of November 2022.
And finally, and most importantly, as a CEO today:
Be Positive and Stay Optimistic
I get it, optimism feels really hard to embrace when you’re walking through quicksand with a blindfold on. But here’s the thing: this is how CEOs are actually wired. We sign up for the job to solve important problems, to create solutions, to believe that what we’re building matters, and to fight our way forward. New disruptive, scary, and world-reshaping technologies have historically expanded human capability and productivity, and, in turn, have created more wealth and abundance for people. That’s not naivety, that’s a repeatable pattern well documented in human history. Heck, it’s played out multiple times in just the last 150 years.
AI will change how your company works. It will change some of the roles on your team, and may even reduce the need for everyone on your current team. But the organizations who thrive through the AI-driven transformation will be the ones led by CEOs and senior executive teams who lead with a positive view of the future and an optimistic belief that their organization’s vision and mission must persist.
So that’s your most important job right now: Be Positive and Stay Optimistic. Maintaining this perspective and personality trait will become increasingly paramount for you as CEO given that it’s a safe bet the AI doomers will continue to beat their drums louder and louder.
NextPlay>Forward AI Disclaimer: I very actively use artificial intelligence and large language models to generate the content you read here, but I do review it and edit it to make sure it can be generally useful to people who read it. Keep in mind that AI can make mistakes - check important information. Let me know if I make any errors and I will correct them.