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Welcome executives and professionals. AI has been on every board agenda for two years and while engineers at your company are power users, most of your organization still uses it like a chatbot.

Since the previous edition, we have reviewed hundreds of the latest insights in agentic and generative AI, spanning best practices, case studies, market dynamics, and innovations.

This briefing outlines what is driving material value — and why it’s important.

In today’s briefing:

• Anthropic’s Claude Cowork adoption guide.

• How enterprises are scaling with OpenAI.

• The end of ERP as we know it?

• The blueprint for agentic operations.

• Transformation and technology in the news.

• Insights for Executive+ members.

• Career opportunities & events.

Read time: 4 minutes.

BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT & CASE STUDIES

Anthropic’s Claude Cowork adoption guide

Brief: Anthropic released a 24-page guide for deploying Claude Cowork across enterprises, covering use cases, rollout timelines, lessons from Anthropic and other organizations, and more.

Breakdown:

• Chapter 1 explains how Claude Cowork is differentiated for high-effort knowledge work through speed, scale, and quality.

• Chapter 2 outlines a five-level maturity model, from early experimentation to driving Claude Cowork adoption at enterprise scale.

• Chapters 3 and 4 break down deployment timelines, practical actions, and what success looks like at each stage of maturity.

• Chapter 5 shows how Anthropic teams use Claude Cowork across finance, strategy, legal, sales, and product management.

Why it’s important: Enterprises should aim to make every employee more productive while building toward the next stage of AI adoption. Connecting systems to complete real work is possible from day one. Give internal champions room to build, then scale their workflows across teams.

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH TELEPORT

Your AI agents shouldn’t share secrets

Brief: Autonomous agents can’t rely on API keys or long-lived credentials anymore. Teleport’s Agentic Identity Framework replaces static secrets with verifiable, cryptographic identity for machine actors at scale.

With Teleport, you get:

• Zero standing privileges for autonomous agents

• Strong, ephemeral machine identities

• Policy-based access control

• Reliable, auditable workflow orchestration

Accelerate AI from prototype to production. Explore the framework.

BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT & CASE STUDIES

How enterprises are scaling with OpenAI

Brief: OpenAI interviewed executives at Philips, BBVA, and other firms, converging on a shared reality: scaling AI is less about “rolling out AI” and more about the conditions where people trust, adopt, and improve it over time.

Breakdown:

• The fastest path to adoption wasn’t a technical rollout, it was building literacy, confidence, and permission to experiment safely.

• AI scaled when teams could redesign workflows, and teams moved faster when security, legal, compliance, and IT were involved early.

• Organizations that earned trust defined what “good” meant early, invested in evaluation, and delayed launches when standards were not fully met.

• The most durable gains came from hybrid workflows, using AI to strengthen expert reasoning and review, not just increase throughput.

Why it’s important: The organizations pulling ahead aren’t simply moving faster. They’re moving more deliberately. OpenAI's guide is not a set of predictions or promises, but an evidence-based view of what has consistently worked in practice, including a 12-point checklist for executives.

MARKET & BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT

The end of ERP as we know it?

Brief: McKinsey examined how AI is disrupting ERP, as early adopters of AI-integrated ERP systems are already gaining a competitive edge, reporting EBIT improvements of 5 percent or more.

Breakdown:

• The “SaaSpocalypse” view argues AI agents replicate ERP capabilities and data moves into microservices instead of rigid tables.

• Others believe ERP backbones remain essential, with AI agents operating on top of stable architectures for compliance and reliability.

• AI agents could reduce ERP implementation effort by more than 50%, breaking the traditional linearity between productivity and headcount.

• McKinsey also explores why enterprises will continue ERP modernization, while value creation increasingly shifts from build to buy.

Why it’s important: While the extent of disruption remains uncertain, ERP ecosystem players will need to reinvent delivery models and solutions to stay relevant. Enterprise customers should actively experiment with emerging AI capabilities and reconsider long-standing approaches to ERP.

AI-NATIVE PROFESSIONAL

How to plan from your calendar with Claude

Brief: In this guide, you'll learn how to use Claude in Chrome to read your calendar, pull context from emails, and flag which meetings need preparation. Run it every evening and start each day knowing what's coming.

Step-by-step:

1. Claude for Chrome lets Claude interact directly with web pages, reading content, clicking, typing, and navigating on your behalf.

2. Claude reads your calendar and email, cross-referencing attendees, threads, and meeting details to build context.

3. Claude reviews each meeting and generates a preparation summary organized around what needs attention most.

4. Claude can book rooms, add links directly to calendar events, and summarize correspondence for important meetings.

Best practice: Grant site-level permissions only to trusted domains, allowing Claude to operate without repeated approval requests.

For the full guide, including prompts, upgrade to Executive+ or The Boardroom.

MARKET & BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT

The blueprint for agentic operations

Brief: IBM surveyed more than 2,000 C-suite executives across 16 countries, publishing a 60-page report on both the biggest opportunities and main obstacles to becoming an interconnected enterprise.

Breakdown:

• Enterprises are learning that operating models such as shared services and GBS, optimized over decades, now constrain AI value.

• 82% of executives said functional silos limit performance, block coordination, and reduce the impact of autonomy.

• The report identifies workflow architecture, interoperable data, and orchestration as foundations for scaling agentic AI operations.

• Autonomous workflow adoption accelerates 5.4 times with six core ingredients, with change management having the greatest impact.

Why it’s important: This new operating paradigm is already in flight. 55% of organizations are actively developing or deploying an agentic AI operating model. IBM’s report includes a C-suite playbook and blueprints for 21 workflows designed to power the interconnected enterprise.

JPMorganChase released a 59-page 2026 tech trends report highlighting context-driven architectures and rising inference demand.

BCG outlined the CFO AI agenda, highlighting shift toward autonomous systems and rebalancing of enterprise planning cycles.

Goldman Sachs outlined how semiconductor companies have outperformed the market, and expects hyperscalers to drive the next AI growth phase.

Salesforce outlined how its engineering org became agentic, including a migration completed 18x faster via an agentic workflow.

OpenAI launched “The Deployment Company”, a $14B business to embed AI engineers inside enterprises, also acquiring AI consulting firm Tomoro.

DBResearch assessed whether Claude AI finance agents change work, noting many bankers will likely continue working late nights for now.

OpenAI unveiled Daybreak, a cybersecurity platform designed to automate vulnerability detection, patch validation, and secure software development.

Google is reportedly exploring a SpaceX rocket-launch deal for orbital data centers, linking AI infrastructure and space ambitions

Celonis launched the Context Model to eliminate enterprise AI blind spots and agreed to acquire AI decision intelligence firm Ikigai Labs.

Anthropic reportedly signed a 7-year, $1.8B cloud infrastructure deal with Akamai, adding another compute avenue to power its Claude models.

Google confirmed hackers used AI to write a zero-day security flaw, catching them before they could break into a widely-used web management tool.

SAP partnered with Anthropic to bring Claude to the SAP Business AI Platform, and Palantir to enhance AI-supported data migration tooling,

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

AIG - Global Head of Agentic AI

Cognizant - AI Consulting Partner

BlackRock - AI Director

EVENTS

Google I/O - May 19-20, 2026

Stanford - Agentic AI Ethics - June 1, 2026

Databricks Data + AI - June 15-18, 2026

Reach enterprise AI decision-makers:

• 66% of readers are C-level executives or VP and Director-level leaders.

• 63.2% of the audience is based in the U.S., EU, UK, ANZ, and Singapore.

• Read by leaders at Microsoft, Deloitte, the Fortune 500, and more.

Guaranteed impression and custom sponsorship packages available, with post-send performance reporting.

Conceived as a practical communication for executives Lewis Walker has worked with, this briefing has become a trusted resource for thousands of senior decision-makers shaping the future of enterprise AI.

We welcome your feedback.