I’ve been watching the corporate world grapple with technological shifts for decades, but nothing, and I mean nothing, has created the kind of existential boardroom anxiety that AI is triggering right now. The speed and scale of this transformation became crystal clear to me while reading about the recent WSJ Leadership Institute’s Board of Directors Council Summit in Palm Beach.
What struck me most wasn’t just the acknowledgment that AI is moving faster than any previous technology wave (though that’s certainly true). It was the fascinating philosophical divide emerging among America’s most powerful directors about how to navigate these uncharted waters.
On one side, you have the revolutionaries like Dan Schulman, Verizon’s CEO and Cisco director, practically shouting from the rooftops that companies need to become more “argumentative” and embrace radical change. “We’re going to go into a world of change right now,” he warned, painting a picture where nimble startups with just 100 employees could generate billions in revenue, threatening established giants.
Then there’s Carolyn Everson—director at household names like Coca-Cola, Under Armour, and Disney—echoing this sentiment with her call for “a sense of urgency” and being “completely dissatisfied with status quo and complacency.” The message is clear: disrupt yourself before someone else does it for you.
But across the boardroom table sit the moderates, like Alex Gorsky (whose director credentials at JPMorgan, Apple, and IBM certainly command attention). His perspective? “Overall, we need to move faster, but it needs to be thoughtful.” Sometimes, he suggests, the board’s role might actually be to slow down a company racing too quickly toward risky AI implementations.
This tension between revolutionary zeal and measured caution perfectly encapsulates the impossible position today’s corporate boards find themselves in. Move too slowly, and you’re roadkill on the AI highway. Move too quickly without proper guardrails, and you might drive your company off a cliff.
What fascinates me is that we’re already seeing early evidence that first-movers might be reaping real rewards. Take BNY, where CIO Leigh-Ann Russell reports they’ve deployed 117 AI solutions (including agents) that are delivering “really, really tangible outcomes that impact our bottom line.” They’ve even created about 100 “digital employees” with their own login credentials and human managers!
Or consider Walmart, using AI agents to source products based on real-time trend signals like teenage shopping patterns. These aren’t just experimental pilots—they’re operational systems creating measurable value.
This directly contradicts that much-discussed MIT study from last August suggesting most generative-AI projects were failing to generate returns. As Russell bluntly put it: “For us, that’s a hard false.” (MIT, notably, didn’t respond when asked for comment—perhaps they’re too busy recalculating?)
The boardroom challenge goes beyond just technology implementation, though. Ellen Kullman—director at Amgen, Carbon, and Goldman Sachs—highlighted the human element, noting boards need to address the “fear and lack of confidence” permeating organizations as AI advances. The key, she suggests, is helping people understand AI can drive top-line growth, not just cost-cutting efficiency.
And there’s the rub. In previous tech revolutions, boards could afford to take a wait-and-see approach, letting early adopters work out the kinks before making significant investments. But AI feels different—more transformative, more immediate, more existential.
As Schulman put it, companies need to stop thinking about 10% improvements and start thinking “10x”—how to improve things tenfold, how to move ten times faster. That’s not evolution; that’s revolution.
I’ve seen many technological shifts in my time observing corporate America, but this feels unprecedented. The divide between the AI revolutionaries and the cautious moderates in America’s boardrooms isn’t just a tactical disagreement—it’s a fundamental philosophical split about the very nature of corporate governance in the age of artificial intelligence.
The question isn’t whether AI will transform business—it already is. The question is whether your board has the right balance of urgency and thoughtfulness to navigate the transformation successfully. And from what I’m seeing, finding that balance might be the most important boardroom challenge of our lifetime.