Leading the agentic enterprise: What the next wave of AI demands from CEOs

lastmansurfing
Dec 16, 2025
1 min read

For decades, technologies have largely been built as tools, extensions of human intent and control that have helped us lift, calculate, store, move, and much more.

But those tools, even the most revolutionary ones, have always waited for us to ‘use’ them, assisting us in doing the work—whether manufacturing a car, sending an email, or dynamically managing inventory—rather than doing it on their own.

With recent advances in AI, however, that underlying logic is shifting. “For the very first time, technology is now able to do work,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently observed. “[For example], inside every robotaxi is an invisible AI chauffeur. That chauffeur is doing the work; the tool it uses is the car.”

This idea captures the transition underway today. AI is no longer just an instrument for human use: Rather, it is becoming an active operator and orchestrator of “the work” itself, not only capable of predicting and generating, but also planning, acting, and learning.