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Welcome executives and professionals. The pivot to agentic AI is not merely an IT upgrade; it is a fundamental expansion of the workforce and transformation of the enterprise.

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:

• Deloitte-Google on scaling agentic AI.

• AI budgets are growing, returns aren't.

• The next phase of knowledge work.

• The agentic era of next best action.

• Transformation and technology in the news.

• Insights for Executive+ members.

• Career opportunities & events.

Read time: 4 minutes.

BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT & CASE STUDIES

Deloitte-Google on scaling agentic AI

Brief: Deloitte AI Institute, with Google Cloud, published a 21-page framework for scaling agentic AI that focuses on technical approaches and human architecture while emphasizing real-world applications and strategies.

Breakdown:

• The pilot-to-agentic enterprise gap centers on three friction points: technical fragility, process inertia and trust deficits.

• Enterprises need a “pragmatic AI” mindset: value over velocity, specialized utility over AGI, outcome-driven roadmaps.

• Adopt a holistic framework for a scalable AI architecture: an agentic OS, developer workbench, an agent repository, and more.

• Beyond technology, insights span human architecture, from executive sponsorship to a culture of iterative failure.

Why it’s important: In the near term, one to two years out, internal agent marketplaces will be standard in large enterprises. By 2028, cross-enterprise collaboration will emerge, where, for example, a retailer's inventory agent negotiates with a supplier's shipping agent to restock autonomously.

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH TELEPORT

The governance gap no one's talking about

Brief: Most enterprises have human access control figured out. AI agents are a different story. Ungoverned machine access is fast becoming your biggest compliance liability, and most security stacks aren’t built to handle it.

With Teleport, you get:

• Unified identity and access for both human and machine actors in one platform

• Short-lived certificates issued per request that auto-expire after use

• Full session logging for every agent action that is centrally auditable

Close the governance gap. Start your 14-day free trial.

MARKET & BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT

AI budgets are growing, returns aren't

Brief: Bain & Company's Automation and AI Pathfinder Survey of 951 global companies shows boards approving bigger budgets each year, while the savings consistently fall short by a margin that should make executives uncomfortable.

Breakdown:

• Nearly 40% of companies that measured AI cost savings landed below 10%, despite targeting 11% to 20%; 90% are raising budgets again.

• Most investment cases assume full automation, but reality is more human: only 7% run fully autonomous agents in production.

• 44% of firm are funding the next AI wave from prior automation savings (e.g RPA, ML) that have consistently come in below target.

• Data access/integration is the top barrier to AI progress. The leaders cite it as a bigger obstacle than those that missed their targets.

Why it’s important: The turning point isn't finding the best AI technology. It's the moment leaders decide they hold responsibility for creating the conditions for AI success. That window to move ahead of rivals is still open, but narrowing faster than many executive teams realize.

MARKET & BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT

The next phase of knowledge work

Brief: OpenAI published insights on how Codex is helping professionals navigate the complexity of modern knowledge work. More than 40 percent of U.S. labor, roughly 72 million people, work primarily with information.

Breakdown:

• Codex tops 5 million weekly users, up 6x since February's desktop launch, with growth shifting from coding to knowledge work.

• Knowledge workers are now 20% of users and adopt over 3x faster than developers, spanning finance, product, design, and beyond.

• Each week, 72% of knowledge workers produce artifacts: documents, multimedia, and increasingly PDFs and spreadsheets.

• The most consequential shift is toward parallel work: half run multiple Codex tasks at once, up from under a third in mid-April.

Why it’s important: Enterprises that give professionals access to these tools and teach them to build and delegate will see the most productivity gains. Codex is not a replacement for knowledge workers, but a way for those closest to the work to act with more agency and capacity to solve hard problems.

AI-NATIVE PROFESSIONAL

How to generate status reports with Claude

Brief: In this guide, you'll learn how to pull status updates from your emails, Slack channels, meeting notes, and project tools to build a tracker showing who's working on what, what's blocked, and where tasks stand.

Step-by-step:

1. Ask Claude to pull information from your connected tools and build a tracker that consolidates everything into one view.

2. Enable connectors so Claude has direct access to your tools as live data sources rather than just pasted-in snippets.

3. Claude searches your tools, reconciles updates from each source, and builds an Excel tracker with clear visual status indicators.

4. Continue with Claude to refine, expand, or dig deeper. Pull related conversations on a blocker to understand its full context.

Best practice: Create a custom skill for generating status reports to embed all the process steps, then reuse it anywhere in Claude by referencing its name.

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

BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT

The agentic era of next best action

Brief: BCG shared insights on next best action (NBA) in the agentic era, a marketing approach that decides the single most valuable thing to offer or say to a specific customer at a specific moment.

Breakdown:

• Well-designed customer journeys unlock highly targeted audiences and have anchored personalization strategies for over a decade.

• Today the journey is more dynamic: channels have multiplied, signals are real-time, and the shelf of content, offers and experiences has grown.

• Personalization must evolve by changing its unit of decision from marketer-orchestrated journeys to agent-composed actions.

• The marketer's role shifts too: from designing journey flows to curating shelf’s content and setting the objectives that agents pursue.

Why it’s important: The stakes here are significant. Organizations that modernize their next best action architecture will compound value across both efficiency and growth: from dramatic reductions in campaign cycle time to step-change increases in addressable revenue.

BCG published a 26-page executive playbook on supply chains, noting that fewer than 25% of firms demonstrate AI maturity at scale.

Deloitte argued only 5% of gen AI pilots deliver sustained value at scale, offering a 2x2 framework to stop, scale, de-prioritize, or enhance AI agents.

SIA released a 97-page report, with Deloitte, on the semiconductor ecosystem powering AI at the foundation of data centers.

Omdia forecast cumulative data-center investment nearing $1.6T by 2030 as the AI Factory market enters its industrialization era.

Futurum analyzed how Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow, AWS, and Google are racing to become the operating system for digital labor.

Atlantic Council published a 54-page report with seven imperatives and a national scorecard to sustain US leadership in AI.

Microsoft unveiled Build 2026 launches including Microsoft Scout, the now-GA Microsoft Discovery, and the Majorana 2 quantum chip.

Anthropic announced it filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to go public, advancing its IPO race with OpenAI.

Microsoft reportedly plans to merge GitHub Copilot, Copilot chat function, Copilot Cowork tool into a single app.

Anthropic expanded Project Glasswing, giving 150 new organizations across 15 countries access to its powerful Claude Mythos Preview model.

OpenAI launched new Codex updates, including Sites that allow users to create and share hosted websites and apps, alongside new role-specific plugins.

Trump signed an executive order asking AI labs to voluntarily hand frontier models to the government for a 30-day security review before release.

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

Deloitte - Vice President, NVIDIA Sales

Citi - Head of Applied AI, Managing Director

AstraZeneca - Head of AI Governance

EVENTS

Infosys - Enterprise AI World Tour - June 14, 2026

Deloitte - The AI Workforce - June 25, 2026

Redmond - Scaling the AI Factory - July 22, 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.