CEO Topics
Markets swing. Weeks feel like a dog year. A CEO’s job is never done until it’s over. It’s why we spend so much time serving CEOs. Their needs are more complex and more demanding than ever. Unless you’ve been a CEO you can never quite empathize with the reality of being one. So, here’s what’s on our minds today.
Based on ongoing Outsell CEO Sentiment surveys, confidential inquiry calls, and off-the-record P2P, F2F and digital problem-solving discussions held throughout the year — most recently in New York and London, this is the short list:
- Geopolitics and business disruption — China, Taiwan, India recalibrating, Greenland, Venezuela, Russia, Iran….
- Monetizing AI beyond internal efficiency and ensuring the business doesn’t become roadkill in the process.
- Improving sales: retention first; net-new revenue (at scale) next; new logos remain illusive.
- Portfolio discipline and treating adjacent products as strategic options, not distractions, while knowing when to make end-of-life decisions.
- Fortifying the content moat and developing stronger licenses.
- Building scaffolding for trust as infrastructure, not simply marketing language.
- Moving data up the value chain into tools and workflow.
- Making important distinctions between LLMs, agentics, SLMs and vertical specialization and having plans for each.
- Keeping pace with Big Tech and foundation model velocity.
- Managing accelerating AI costs and what can realistically be passed through.
- Modernizing infrastructure without “rip and replace” chaos.
- Incenting talent to use AI internally.
- Defining where AI sits in the org chart.
- M&A, valuations, PE exits and so much more.
Resilience surfaced as the operative word in both cities. And with it, trust. Delivering trust. Offering trust. Being trustworthy. In a world where models scrape, agents answer, and bots now have résumés who and what can you trust?
One leader predicted there would be more agents than people on the planet in the not-too-distant future. How do we manage that?
The monetization question dominated. AI drives efficiency. It reduces costs. It sharpens internal execution. But CEOs want to know where incremental revenue materializes. Improve the core first. Protect retention. Experiment around the edges. Smaller adjacent products are now getting evaluated as strategic insurance, not distraction.
The moat conversation has sharpened. Leaders now assume the models have their content. Insist on licenses. Treat IP protection as a commercial lever. If proprietary content measurably improves outcomes inside AI workflows, you hold leverage. Good. If not, you compete as generic software on someone else’s infrastructure. Not good.
Meanwhile, the stack keeps separating. Infrastructure. Application layer. Workflow layer. Vertical specialization. The technology tracks are largely laid. The race shifts to application and workflow control. And AI costs remain unsettled with few leaders feeling confident they can pass them through.
Our research shows budgets are tight and almost always grow slower than price increases. So, market share remains the name of the game — a long-held reality given our research about growth rates and how this industry (in any business model) is funded.
And then there’s the organization. Where does AI sit in the loop? Who owns it? (Gentle reminder: Remember digital and TQM? They became a ’thing’ and a role, until they disappeared into the fabric of the business. Gen AI will become the same.)
What does an agent’s seat at the table look like? CEOs are incenting internal adoption, pushing retraining, and confronting cultural resistance directly. Technology moves faster than people. Leadership stamina matters. We are playing the long game.
These were the weeks Anthropic ‘went vertical,’ stock’s tanked, Gartner announced a sale and its earnings. We looked at the topic of brands vs. LLMs every which way with another leader predicting that brands will be in front of LLMs and LLMs will operate behind them. Suddenly being a pureplay software company was out. Being an information services was back in vogue. Who knew? No differentiated content; no LLM value rising. How about that.
At Outsell, we ensure CEOs grow revenue and mitigate risk in the AI era.
How? Millions invested in unique data and research providing essential benchmarks and best practices, vertical market and competitive coverage. Access to SMEs who have been there/done that and can advise into your most critical issues.
And through the alchemy of unique P2P communities from within and across neighborhoods to review case studies and discuss the pressing topics that you can’t take to your board, your team, or home to your loved ones.
It is where the best minds convene and out-of-the box answers come into focus. These CEO Topics are real and so are our events on offer. Join us.