Gartner surveyed 456 CEOs, and 77% stated a clear belief that AI is ushering in a new era of business, citing hiring and measurement as the barriers. But what this means isn’t about the next AI hire or moving from pilot to production. It’s deeper than that.
When the CEOs were asked about their leadership’s AI-savviness, as a whole not a single group shined.
- → CIO: 44%
- → CFO: 16%
- → CMO: 15%
- → COO: 14%
- → CHRO: 7%
These are the leaders who decide where AI gets deployed, how budgets shift, and whether the org actually changes. Few, if any, C-suites have the CEO’s confidence across the board. The barrier they’re at isn’t the talent pipeline. It’s the people in the room leading the change.
What complicates this even further is most CEOs grading everyone struggle to meet the AI-fluency bar. Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found just 15% of CEOs qualify as what they call “Trailblazers,” leaders who are building their own AI fluency, spending 8+ hours a week personally engaged with AI.
Uber’s CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, has been building AI into the core of the business since he took over in 2017. During a conversation with Stephanie Flanders at Davos, he said most companies are “play-acting” with AI. Uber rebuilt its customer service from scratch, replacing old policies with goals and letting AI reason through them. The company was running machine learning at scale years before OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT. Ninety percent of Uber’s engineers use AI daily. Thirty percent are rethinking the company’s architecture through it.
During an interview with SEMAFOR, Khosrowshahi shared he’d vibecoded himself a ‘to-do’ app. He shared this not because the app matters to Uber, but to show that kind of personal fluency is necessary for leaders to know what to expect from their teams. They live the possibilities.
Gartner predicts that by 2027, a lack of AI literacy will rank among the top three reasons CMOs are replaced at large enterprises.
The CMO may be the canary. But the rest of the C-suite is in the same mine.