The CEO's Job in the AI Era: Accelerating Idea to Outcome (I2O)

As AI spreads beyond developers into every workflow, the differentiator shifts from tools to leadership. In this episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast, WWT Co-Founder and CEO Jim Kavanaugh argues that winning in AI will lean heavily on culture: how fast an organization can learn, adapt and change. The new leadership challenge is moving fast without creating downstream chaos.

More about this week's guest:

Jim Kavanaugh is globally recognized as an innovative business executive and is renowned for his inclusive, people-first leadership style. His emphasis on promoting a healthy, vibrant workplace has anchored WWT's award-winning culture, while his savvy business acumen has propelled the company's substantial growth. Jim leads WWT's 18-person executive team and focuses on technology innovation—for both WWT and its customers and partners—long-term planning, strategic acquisitions, financial performance, employee development and workplace culture. Under his leadership, WWT has grown into a multi-billion-dollar company with approximately 12,000 employees globally that is a great place to work for all and is a key business enabler to 80+ of the Fortune 100 companies.

The AI Proving Ground Podcast leverages the deep AI technical and business expertise from within World Wide Technology's one-of-a-kind AI Proving Ground, which provides unrivaled access to the world's leading AI technologies. This unique lab environment accelerates your ability to learn about, test, train and implement AI solutions. 

Learn more about WWT's AI Proving Ground.

The AI Proving Ground is a composable lab environment that features the latest high-performance infrastructure and reference architectures from the world's leading AI companies, such as NVIDIA, Cisco, Dell, F5, AMD, Intel and others.

Developed within our Advanced Technology Center (ATC), this one-of-a-kind lab environment empowers IT teams to evaluate and test AI infrastructure, software and solutions for efficacy, scalability and flexibility — all under one roof. The AI Proving Ground provides visibility into data flows across the entire development pipeline, enabling more informed decision-making while safeguarding production environments. 

Transcript

The CEO’s Job in the AI Era

SPEAKER_00 0:00

In the first half of our conversation with WWT co-founder and CEO Jim Kavanaugh, we explored how AI coding assistants are accelerating execution across the enterprise. But now comes the hard part. When execution speeds up, leadership decisions compress with it. AI is forcing executives to balance innovation velocity, enterprise security guardrails, and organizational stability, often all at the same time and without precedent. And if you're currently deciding how fast your organization should move with agentech AI while keeping people, risk, and strategy aligned, this episode is your leadership operating model. Just FYI, if you miss part one of this conversation, we examine how AI coding assistants are reshaping the economics of software and enterprise execution. In this second half, the focus shifts to leadership, how executives translate AI capability into organizational change across culture, governance, and decision making. But today's conversation starts with the question many leaders are quietly asking: When technology moves faster than institutions, what must leadership change first? So let's jump in. There's lots of other companies out there as well that say they want to or are AI first.

Why CEOs Can’t Delegate AI Anymore

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Yeah, I would, I would say, you know, one is that, you know, fortunately I've got a great team of leaders and uh, you know, all of our employees, you know, I think just great people that are doing a great job. So, you know, my goal is always to kind of work myself out of a job. And so, you know, you try to do that, but there always things pop up, some issues or opportunities to go and do different things. So my my point where I am now is that I do think the business is going really well. I I think we've got strong leaders and we got great people and we're executing and we're growing. We just acquired soft choice. You know, it was a, you know, for the, you know, what acquisitions can be very disruptive and and most of them don't work. And, you know, the acquisition of soft choice has been great. You know, it's been almost a year now. And, you know, the the integration of the two organizations culturally and from a people standpoint has been awesome. And then the the the actual traction and the growth and the synergies we're getting from the two organizations, I couldn't be happier with. And so when I look at that and I look at, you know, how a business is going and growing overall is fantastic. And so if you look at where my time and attention intentionally, I've had this discussions, I haven't discussed it on a podcast so much. Oh, we're breaking news. Right. Somewhat. You know, as I've said to like Mike and Sarah, you know, and Andrew, who, you know, spend a lot of time on the AI, very dedicated. I'm like, I could take all my time and spend it all on driving, you know, our AI vision and our AI adoption methodology, you know, approach internally and externally. And it would be probably the most productive and the most well-spent time that I could have. And I've told them the same thing. Now they have day jobs that they have to do, but this is the way I'm looking at it. It's so important. And, you know, I am carving out more and more time because I think what we're doing in the specific areas around driving AI infrastructure, as I talked about, our collaboration and and partnership with NVIDIA and and others building that out, and then looking at the AI outcomes, which I've talked about, you know, how important and how significant this AI on lock of leveraging these AI coding platforms and IDEs is just going to be game-changing. So to lean in and to be a thought leader with very pragmatic but aggressive approaches and methodologies in regards to how to uptrain and upskill IT organizations is a huge opportunity. So, from my perspective, yeah, I think about this very, very, very differently. And any other last thing I would say, fortunately, on behalf of worldwide, I see all of this, my attention on what I've just described is nothing but synergistic and complementary and a multiplier effect of everything else we do, because all the things that I just described around AI infrastructure, coding platforms, you know, developing applications and outcomes, AI outcomes and digital transformation for clients, all of those things are very connected to the IT infrastructure that we provide also. And those things come together and we can provide even better value for our clients and help them build out even a more efficient and impactful IT organization. And, you know, the one you know thing I would also say that, you know, we've talked about this before, but it's more relevant than ever. When you look at 20 years ago and organizations or IT organizations, you know, they wanted a seat at the table, you know, with the executives. They wanted to be able to, you know, have a voice, you know, with the CEO and in the board, you know, that is so, you know, front and center now. You know, boards, CEOs, I mean, they they are looking at IT, they're looking at AI, they're they're looking at cyber, they're looking at digital transformation. These, you know, every business is an IT business. Every business is an AI business. And so that's why I am so focused and committed to this because I think we're in the early stages and I think the opportunity is immense, and uh, we're gonna keep charging harder.

SPEAKER_00 6:37

You talk about potentially, you know, the foreseeable future, you leaning in more towards driving AI within you know our organization. How much of that relies on you being intimately familiar with AI tools? Like, do you have to be very familiar with what the latest is from open AI versus Gemini versus anthropic, so on and so forth? I mean, I I see you railing out notebook LM slides now. So, I mean, you're obviously a power user. How much about AI do you have to know to drive it for others?

The Hardest Part of AI Transformation: Unlearning

SPEAKER_01 7:07

You know, uh, i you you definitely I don't have to be an expert in using all the different tools, but uh personally, I'm like, I I don't know how you go out and communicate with any authenticity and you know, just real substance unless you're willing to put the time and effort to really understand what's going on and have a passion around it. And I have a huge passion around this because I think it's so important to the company and I think it's such a massive opportunity. So do I need to be, you know, a data scientist, which I'm not smart enough to be one, so I check that, you know, put that aside, you know, and do I need to be writing code and knowing all the different platforms? Probably not. I but I do spend a lot of time, you know, doing an incredible amount of research. And where I learn is from all of our smart people. And that's why, you know, people might find me, you know, at times I'll I'll you know be kind of leading from 30,000 foot view, and other times I'll be down in the trenches. And now I'm down in the trenches because I want to know. And before I can go out and communicate confidently to the entire organization and to our customers, I want to see these tools working. And I want to know from our best and brightest what works, what doesn't work. And the the tools are changing and leapfrogging each other so fast and how to use them requires some really, really smart people. And that's what I believe we bring to our customers and our partners as we use our advanced technology center, as we use our AI proving ground, we use our cyber range. These are things that, you know, the the doctor has his hand in the patient. The doctor is actually operating, the engineers are working, you know, hand in hand with a collective group of really, really talented people to be able to bring that expertise, not just in one specific area, but across an enterprise to our customers. And that I find incredibly helpful. So when we can go in, and personally, when I can go in and you know, have discussions with executives and CEOs and do it with a real understanding and a real level of confidence that we can bring these capabilities and real value to them and kind of guide them to what I think they should be doing and investing. That that makes me feel good because the last thing I'm gonna do is go in and guess at this. And so so no, and I find it fun too. I find it, you know, to be very enjoyable and uh to connect with you know our employees and see individuals that you know, uh even in our coding off site last week, or a couple of individuals that they were just like it was like a kid on Christmas, you know, it was like giddy. It was like so happy to literally go through, you know, some of the things that they were doing. I'm like, that's pretty cool. Yeah, that's you know, to see that kind of passion and energy, and it really validates that the individual, a very bright individual, was like how amazed some of the things are that they're figuring out and they're doing.

SPEAKER_00 10:28

Yeah. Well, I mean, that just speaks to you get excited, that starts building momentum, and that starts cranking the flywheel one by one, and then eventually by an organization. Uh maybe another question along the same lines of kind of what AI are you using? But you know, so much of integrating AI into workflows relies on that quote unquote unlearning your historical processes and starting to build them back up with kind of an AI forward mindset. Have you taken that approach with your role as a as a CEO or any role that you that you have for that matter? What have you unlearned about yourself or your processes and how have you started to put AI into it?

SPEAKER_01 11:06

Yeah, it's a really good question. The piece around, I would say unlearning, if you know, if there are habits or things that you're doing that just don't make sense any longer, I think, you know, you need to think about that. If you are managing or leading people in a way that, you know, just doesn't make sense. I think you need to think about those types of things. I mean, you know, there's still a lot of opinion, you know, if I look right now, just in regards to hybrid work, should you mandate everybody comes back in the office? Some people do. I don't. You know, I I think there is, you know, a lot of, you know, very, very important reasons that we need to bring people back together at certain times culturally in collaboration. But the way that we work, we have employees all over the world. And employees aren't in any one specific location. And we are all collaborating with people all over the country and all over the world all the time. And so I think, you know, how you look at it, if you're talking about unlearning, you know, my view is when, you know, co-founded worldwide back in 1990, my view was I'm gonna be the first one in and the last one out every day. And I am gonna work, and that's just the way it is. And you come in and you show up, and I would look whose car is in the parking lot and when do they get in? And I mean, this is now I've matured over the years. So, but I'll just tell you, I mean, this is the way it was. I mean, you need to grind, you need to be willing to grind it out, and you need to put that time in. And you, you know, and I told leaders, Joe Canning and Tom Strong, you're gonna come in. I knew, you know, we both played soccer together again. I said, You guys are gonna have to lead by example. You're gonna be scrutinized because you you know me, and you know, and we gotta lead by example, first in, last out, be willing to do whatever it takes, work weekends, nights, you name it, go sweep the floors, doesn't make any difference. And but now, you know, where we are in the size of the company, I'm like, that's not the way it operates. I still expect, you know, if you want to be great, you don't work like the average individual. You know, if you want to do something special, you've got to be willing to put that time in. But the way that you lead and operate an organization and like what we have worldwide here, I know there's people that bust their buttons. So you got to create an environment where they feel connected, they feel engaged, they feel like they're part of the team and they want to work hard because that's who they are and they feel like they've been treated and they bring that passion. And I know we've got people all over the place that, you know, they work long hours and I'll work at night and I'll work different things, but it's not my job to babysit, you know, everybody of they need to go do something with their kids, take them somewhere, they they do that. So talking about like kind of relearning, I think that's just something, it's not just an AI thing. It's as we all continue to grow and evolve, and there's just different ways to run different businesses. People can decide how they want to do it. Just so happens to be that's the way that I look at it. And oh, by the way, it's not just my decision. You know, I'll run this by all the executive team and I'll run it by all of our employees. And I think I'd have a revolt if we came back and we said, and again, I don't think it would create more productivity. I think it would create more angst. So when I look at that as kind of an example of the question you asked, I think it applies also to this massive transformation around AI. There are gonna be times that things are gonna change and the way that we learn and the way that we collaborate and interact are gonna change. And, you know, we need to think about those things and think about what's the the most effective way to do it, even if it means you need to change the way that you used to operate, you know. So, and that's where I think it comes back to being a lifelong learner and and being willing to adapt and change.

Why AI Is Creating Fear Inside Companies

SPEAKER_00 15:18

We were talking about embracing change last time. You were on the podcast, I want to say it was you know four or five months ago, maybe. Uh, for those out there, if you haven't checked it out, definitely go listen because it was a fantastic episode. But I I I asked you somewhat point blank, but you mostly identified the question, which was how how do you grapple with the concept of people out there that have fear of AI replacing their job? And at the time you said, you know, it's about embracing change and it's about continuous learning. And we've, you know, heard a little bit about what you've mentioned now, but like if you don't keep up, you're you're gonna put yourself at risk. It's not a threat, it's just the reality of the situation. How has your thought on kind of that idea of employees being nervous about AI replacing what they do? Maybe beyond the if you don't adapt, you you'll put yourself at risk. How has that changed?

SPEAKER_01 16:03

You know, it it really hasn't. I think it's still, you know, I think it's still a a a topic and a and something that people are thinking about. And I really don't change my my perspective on that. I, you know, we don't know how things are going to play out exactly. But I can tell you, you know, to date, you know, we you know, if anything, we're adding more people. And we are a growth company. So the intent is to upskill all of our, you know, employees and continue to look at how the work environment is changing and look for opportunities to take talented employees to continue to grow the business. But I will say just you know, from a macro perspective, you know, you got to be realistic as a leader. When changes, you know, as a leader, when you go out, and I say this all the time, as you're the leader and you're rolling down change and you're telling everybody to be comfortable and don't worry about it. I'm like, no, flip it around, make the CEO change, and all of a sudden, you know, I'm human just like everybody else. There's a level of angst that goes with that. And you're like, oh, what does that mean? And and so I think just having an appreciation and and being transparent, you know, with everybody that, yeah, I understand, you know, we're all, you know, human and you know, we're just trying to figure this out. So I think that's just one piece of it. And then I think the other is continuing to be as honest and transparent as things continue to evolve and communicating that with your employees of how that is looking, how things are changing, or are there anything just uh a really, you know, transformational material to the organization? But it doesn't change the fact that in the world that we're in today, I truly believe companies that are going to survive and thrive are gonna be ones with leadership and with organizations that know how to adapt a change and learn. It's not gonna be the one that is the best AI company today or the best digital company. It's gonna be the company that has the leadership and a culture that understands how to adapt, change, and take advantage of opportunities as they move forward. And and that is different than understanding being a subject matter expert in a specific technology. That's more of a cultural and a leadership thing.

Making Bold AI Bets Without Breaking the Enterprise

SPEAKER_00 18:33

Yeah, that's fantastic. Jim, uh, this is the last question I have for you. I'm gonna read a little bit here. This is a quote from from your friend G2 Patel, Cisco president. He mentioned this because he was a guest of yours at the summit that you mentioned uh last week, but he's he wrote this in a LinkedIn post. The absence of irrationality in it in our ambition might end up becoming our biggest limiter in the next wave of who human evolution in the AI era. Okay, so he's talking about you need to have a rational ambition right now to kind of grow. He's talking, you know, 10, 20x. Let's get a little irrational here. So I he's saying that you need to be irrational. Yeah, you need to have an irrational sense of ambition to be the you know the top of the top in the future. What is kind of doesn't have to be super irrational, but like what is the ambition that you have for not just WWT but the the industry in general as it relates to taking advantage of AI?

SPEAKER_01 19:26

Yeah, knowing G2, who is a great guy and very smart and is is leaning into AI in a in a big way, you know, if I based on the statement that you just you just mentioned, I think, you know, what he's saying, and I would have to agree with it, I'll talk to him about it and just uh but I think what he's saying is that the opportunity with AI is so significant and it is the potential is so massive that none of us really know what that opportunity is and what's behind number door door number two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. So I think he's saying that you need to think big and you need to be bold. And if you're thinking the way that you used excuse me, the the way that you used to think, just in regards to kind of like the step changes is the way it works, you're potentially gonna miss out on a big opportunity. That's that's what I think knowing G2 that he's like there may be some benefit. And this is where I think it's there's a bit of art and science of you know, going on about the statement he had there's there's an art and science of of of like pushing the team, and maybe it's in like we talked about, you know, things around governance and security, taking certain areas and being really, really bold, not uh potentially betting the business or taking an area that you know if you miss, you're gonna, you know, you're you're just gonna cut the business in half. You know, you're gonna really cripple the company. The the opportunity is how do you actually be aggressive, grow the business, do the things you need to do, but do understand the opportunity is so significant and so big that you may need to get in with a group and think a bit irrationally and think bigger than what oh, that's not even possible. That could never happen. And it's like I I agree, I think that's a fascinating statement and an approach. And I agree if it's not the entire plan. If the entire plan was around let's be irrational, no, no, no, then I know that's not what he's saying. Yeah, and he would be like, Of course. But tell him I said that. He was but no, I I I think it's a it's a really, really insightful view. I you know, that being irrational today. And placing big bets on some things and getting people to think about it is not completely irrational. It is because the models may end up actually delivering more than what you were actually thinking irrationally. They may actually overachieve that.

SPEAKER_00 22:17

Yeah. I mean, put the pieces in place, get the guardrails there, and that'll really allow you to go accomplish that irrational feat. Yeah. It's it's it's it's fun fodder to kind of uh end an episode on Jim. That's a good way to do it. Thank you so much for for taking the time and and joining us on another episode. Uh we'll have you on again soon, I'm sure.

SPEAKER_01 22:33

My my pleasure. And glad, uh, I just like to say I'm happy I made it twice now. I mean, uh, you know, I two timer. We'll have to start making jackets. Yeah, beautiful.

What Winning Companies Will Do Differently With AI

SPEAKER_00 22:43

I love it. Thanks. Thanks again, Jim. Thank you. Okay, thanks again to Jim for joining us here in the studio. It's clear that AI is accelerating execution, but the real transformation happens in how organizations make those decisions. The lesson isn't to move faster, it's to become clear about priorities, about risk, and about the future you're actually trying to create. This episode of the AI Proving Ground Podcast was co-produced by Nas Baker and Kara Cood. Our audio and video engineer is John Knoblock. My name is Brian Felt. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.