How Executives Actually Talk About AI

**Karen Stokes-Lockhart** (0:02)
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Welcome to Gartner ThinkCast. I'm Karen Stokes-Lockhart. Today, we're diving into what executives talk about when they talk about AI. Pulled from one of his recent standout conference sessions, Gartner VP Analyst, Nate Suda, will cover how executive discussions about AI are evolving and why that evolution matters. He'll break down three distinct but overlapping conversations, ROI, workforce and operating philosophy. And what they reveal about how AI is redefining not just technology strategy, but the very structure and design of the enterprise itself. You'll learn what it really means to become an AI-shaped organization.
Now, here's Nate Suda.

**Nate Suda** (1:18)
All right, we got an interesting one here. What executives talk about when they talk about AI? What do executives talk about when they talk about AI? What are we talking about? Again, I promise we won't get into unquestioned questions, or maybe we will. But in all seriousness, what we are seeing is that the way that C-Suites talk about AI is changing. CEOs have much bigger expectations of AI. It was a bit like two years ago when we're talking about AI, it was like the CEO was like way back there, we're trying to like pull them along. They don't kind of get on the train. And now, all of a sudden, for many organizations, they're way out in front. I'm going to be talking about that and we'll talk about what that means for CIOs. So we've got three sections. We're going to talk about new conversations on value. The way we see the value conversation evolving in the C-Suite. We'll talk about the AI-shaped organization and the near-term features and midterm implications. So let's start going with new conversations on value. Now, I have to warn you, the way I tend to present, we're going to jump straight in. So we're seeing three C-Suite conversations on AI. And I'm going to tell it in terms of a story, in terms of what was happening in 2024 and 2025, and now going into 2026 So in 2024, the C-Suite conversation was all about ROI.
And that conversation is continuing. That happened last year, it's going to happen this year. It's never going to stop, that's going to continue. But as C-Suites were talking about ROI, they said, wait a minute, this is going to impact the workforce, and actually we need the workforce on board to get that ROI. So then in 2025, a new conversation emerged, and that was about the workforce.
And that's continuing, and we're going to hear a lot more about that this year. But what we're noticing is that now, at the very tail end of last year and going now into 2026, we're seeing a new conversation in the C-Suite emerge. And this is an emerging one, it's a new one, it's different, and we're calling this the operating philosophy conversation.
Now, the organizing question around each of these conversations is a little bit different. With ROI, it's straightforward. What's the ROI? With the workforce, what about the people?
But with the operating philosophy, that's different. That's how will we win? That's a very different conversation. And we see that the person or the role who is at the center of these conversations, not exclusively, but primarily is different. With ROI, it's very much around the CFO and the CIO. With the workforce, it's very much around the CHRO, Chief HR Officer, and the CIO. But it's the CEO who is at the focus of that operating philosophy conversation. And what I think is very, very interesting is that when the CEO asks that question, how will we win?
If the others, members of the C-suite, are in that ROI conversation, that's kind of where their head's at, what they hear is, how do I deliver an AI initiatives that's going to give me 20% financial return? But this is a very, very different question or objective than the question that the CEO is asking. They're asking something very, very different. They're not talking about financial health, which is the focus of the ROI conversation. They're talking about competitive strategy. I think that's kind of a strange way to describe the workforce conversation. Well, when we hear this conversation in the C-suite, the questions that emerge, the next level of questions are, well, what about tacit knowledge? What about experience? What about skills? What about attrition of knowledge in the organization? What about pipeline of leaders and development and our workforce? Are we making our organization brittle or stronger? More brittle or stronger? So it's actually a question of organizational resilience.