Leading a Generative AI-fueled enterprise: A CEO series

About the series

Generative AI remains a high priority for CEOs, and according to our latest Fortune/Deloitte CEO Survey, 79% believe accelerating innovation is one of the top use cases for implementing Generative AI (GenAI).

With this series of thought leadership pieces, Deloitte aims to help CEOs see ahead into the future to imagine and pursue a GenAI vision that maximizes value for their organizations.

Article 1: A CEO's guide to envisioning the Generative AI enterprise

The success of a company’s GenAI adoption often rests on how well the CEO sets the tone and casts the vision for the enterprise.

Over the past year, awareness of GenAI seemingly boundless possibilities has continued to expand. This exponential growth has instilled a growing belief among CEOs and other business leaders that it has the potential to significantly augment, if not substitute, even the most intricate and unstructured avenues of value creation.

But the reality of the past year is stark. There has been a lot of activity and interest, and plenty of proofs of concept and demos, and yet, a disjointed approach has prevented most companies from fully harnessing the potential of GenAI. Moreover, the hard investment tradeoffs that CEOs have had to face have limited their ability to develop critical capabilities, including foundational technology and workforce investments. The GenAI shift requires business leaders—most acutely, CEOs—to alter how they lead the enterprise.

This article in brief:

• The opportunity to rebuild: For certain jobs and industries, especially those that involve knowledge work, GenAI is poised to have a widespread impact, and early movers can take advantage.
• Realizing a future-state autonomous enterprise: Value creation through automation used to be limited by the inability to process large amounts of unstructured data, restricting it to tasks requiring low creative difficulty, low context variability, and high accuracy. That’s no longer the case with GenAI.
• Humans with AI: Creating value through GenAI requires CEOs to reimagine ways of working and the role of human contributions to the workplace. Articulating a compelling vision of humans with AI (the human + AI advantage) can help a forward-thinking CEO outpace the competition.
•  The CEO’s role: To better capture value and realize the full potential of the autonomous enterprise, CEOs have a vital role to play in three significant areas: setting the vision, communicating that vision and making the right investments to accelerate the journey toward it.