The AI Leadership Imperative

Welcome to the HBR Executive Agenda for April 16, 2026. In this issue: The AI Leadership Imperative New Date: HBR Executive Live with Lyft CEO David Risher New Email Series: “Becoming an Octopus Organization” The AI Leadership Imperative “There will only be two kinds of companies in the future,” says Jeetu Patel, president and chief product officer at Cisco. “Those that are AI-forward, and those that are irrelevant.” Patel, who doubles as Cisco’s (unofficial) chief AI evangelist, has spent the past few years remaking the global technology giant for the AI era. I spoke with him last week at a special HBR Executive event at HumanX, a big AI conference in San Francisco. At our session, he offered insights for leaders who want to accelerate similar transformations. Patel echoed a theme I heard repeatedly at HumanX: AI isn’t merely creating opportunities for efficiency and time-saving. It’s setting the stage for businesses to reinvent themselves at their core. The challenge is whether executives can move fast enough to stay competitive in this new world. And that makes leadership, not technology, the key driver of success or failure. Patel urges leaders to think big. AI’s deeper value depends on effective widespread integration, which he believes will allow companies to superspeed the development of new products and services. And as the cost of developing new things approaches zero, deciding what not to build will become a critical capability. Making those strategic decisions will elevate distinctly human skills like judgment, intuition, and empathy toward the customer. The companies that win will need to create and sustain a culture that works for this era, he says. Winners need to operate at high speed for long periods. “It’s not sprint vs marathon, but both simultaneously,” Patel says. “And if leadership doesn’t drive it from the top, it won’t happen.” Here’s Patel’s advice on AI strategy: On driving adoption. The companies that are moving fastest with AI are prioritizing repetition over results. Patel advises leaders not to immediately aim for a clear ROI. Instead, they should drive their teams to put in the hours so that they can attain AI familiarity and fluency. Only once that’s accomplished can one think about using AI to drive outcomes. In other words, you can’t optimize what you don’t yet understand. On strategy execution. AI can shorten product cycles dramatically. The old three-year roadmaps are a thing of the past. Patel says Cisco now operates in 7- to 14-day product cycles. “You need to set insanely ambitious goals,” he says. “If someone says something will take nine months, ask if it can be done in two weeks. Often it can.” On management. Patel says Cisco no longer believes in full-time managers. Everyone should be a player-coach. The biggest inefficiency, he says, isn’t entry-level talent but the middle-management layers. “If you’re only directing work, you’re overhead,” he says. “If you’re creating value, you’re core.” On scaling. Big companies tend to be good at experimentation, but they’re bad at doubling down when something works. Sometimes they get stuck in an endless experimentation loop; other times they rush out products too soon. Make sure you have a product that your customer base–and not just the early adopters–truly needs and wants. “Too many companies skip ahead and end up scaling garbage,” he says. On leadership. Patel tries to hire for three key traits: hunger (you can’t teach it), curiosity (a willingness to try and fail), and clarity of thought (which drives communication and influence). Directing a winning team is all about inspiration. “The real test of leadership isn’t hiring ‘A’ players,” he says, “but getting ‘B’ players to do A-level work.” There’s a lot we’re still learning about AI, of course, and there are plenty of concerns associated with its growing adoption. But the technology is already starting to remake the business world. There isn’t yet a clear blueprint for success, but executives like Patel are starting to demonstrate how their companies are making the pivot to an AI-powered future. N ew Date: Live with Lyft CEO David Risher on April 27 Please update your calendars: Due to scheduling issues, our upcoming HBR Executive Live with Lyft CEO David Risher has been moved to April 27 at 11:00am ET. Risher has said that 2026 will be a “transformational” year for the company, as it introduces autonomous vehicles and looks to evolve from a ride-sharing app to a “global hybrid transportation platform.” He’ll join me to discuss: How Lyft is evolving its business model to compete—and win—in this new era How it plans to differentiate and carve out competitive advantage in a crowded, fast-moving category How it will stay relentlessly customer focused while navigating mounting margin pressure And, as always, we’ll take your questions. Register here Thriving in an Era of Continuous Transformation Many leaders are exhausted—often not because of the work itself, but because of the friction … the missed connections … the circular meetings … the feeling that every good idea must navigate a minefield of permissions before it can see the light of day. These practices were built for a different era, one of assembly lines and predictable outputs. To thrive today, organizations need to be more adaptable and nimble, more fluid and alive. They need to behave more like an octopus, nature’s master of distributed intelligence, argue Phil Le-Brun and Jana Werner, executives in residence at Amazon Web Services and authors of The Octopus Organization: A Guide to Thriving in a World of Continuous Transformation. In a new email series, Le-Brun and Werner tackle eight outdated habits that prevent companies from achieving their desired transformation. They also offer tactics to help you move beyond rigid structures to nurture the living, adaptable organization you aspire to create. Sign up here

The AI Leadership Imperative

Summary.

Exclusive Benefits

Partner Center