August 19 | 11am – 12pm PT or 2pm – 3pm ET

You’ve declared your ambition to integrate AI into your function. You’ve approved a budget. A few use cases have launched. And yet the question that should have come first has no clear answer: what AI is actually for in this business. 

You’re not alone. Across the enterprises we work with, the pattern is consistent: the pressure to move on AI is real, the investment is approved, and the foundational work of defining purpose, aligning leadership, and designing the operating model gets treated as something to retrofit later. The pilots run, the tools get adopted in pockets, and a year on, the boardroom keeps asking what they’re actually getting from all of it. 

This is the session for leaders building AI from the foundation up, not retrofitting a solution across your organization. Drawing on our experience helping enterprises build the foundation for AI before scaling it, we’ll share what we’ve seen that separates the organizations getting this right from those running expensive experiments. It comes down to three moves: deciding what AI is for, aligning leadership behind it, and designing the operating model to deliver on it. 

What we’ll dig into:

• The connections between AI vision and business strategy, operating model, and culture that decide whether the vision lands or stalls 

• How to define an AI vision that lands as a real direction, not a slogan that leaves teams guessing 

• How to design an operating model that delivers alignment, accountability, and scale, not just isolated AI wins 

• How leaders are turning AI ambition into measurable outcomes, and the governance and metrics behind it 

• A practical roadmap to align leadership, decision rights, and systems before AI scales 

The organizations that get this foundation right in 2026 will be the ones still running ahead in 2027. The rest will be cycling through pilots, debating ROI, and explaining to their boards why the AI investment hasn’t landed.