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Welcome executives and professionals. Making the promise of agentic AI a practical reality that delivers value, safely and securely, requires new thinking and coordination across the C-suite.

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’s AI playbook for CXOs.

• Anthropic’s new AI agent best practices.

• Capturing value from physical AI.

• Sovereign AI for resilience and impact.

• Transformation and technology in the news.

• Insights for Executive+ members.

• Career opportunities & events.

Read time: 4 minutes.

EXECUTIVE INSIGHT

Deloitte’s AI playbook for CXOs

Brief: Deloitte published a role-by-role playbook outlining how each C-suite executive should think about their responsibilities in putting agentic AI to work, including key actions and questions.

Breakdown:

• CEOs steer strategy, major technology and organizational decisions, and mobilize the board and stakeholders around the vision.

• COOs align tech with strategy while building the workforce, processes, and capabilities to enable and scale AI transformation.

• CIOs and CTOs work across business and tech silos to align architecture decisions and tech investments with enterprise-wide priorities.

• The report also outlines key questions CHROs, CFOs, and CROs should ask, and the actions they should own to enable adoption.

Why it’s important: Turning agentic AI into sustainable enterprise value requires coordinated leadership across the C-suite. Each executive plays a distinct role in aligning strategy, tech, workforce, and risk management to deploy agents responsibly at scale.

BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT & CASE STUDIES

Anthropic’s new AI agent best practices

Brief: Anthropic released Building Effective AI Agents: Architecture Patterns and Implementation Frameworks, a new 30-page guide outlining best practices and guidelines for building production agentic systems.

Breakdown:

• The guide covers how to choose between single-agent, multi-agent, and workflow-based architectures.

• When to use sequential, parallel, and evaluator-optimizer patterns, with Anthropic’s framework helping selection.

• Best practices for context management, modular design, and reusability through “Skills” to improve reliability and scalability.

• Deployment examples from firms building agentic systems at scale, including Coinbase, Intercom, and Thomson Reuters.

Why it’s important: Successfully implementing AI agents requires aligning technical complexity with business value. Start with single agents to prove ROI, build observable systems from day one, and evolve architectures based on performance data.

TOGETHER WITH RESOLVE

What is manual IT really costing you?

Brief: Evaluate the true cost of manual IT operations and uncover the ROI of intelligent automation. The Automation Impact Analyzer™ shows leaders how much faster, leaner, and smarter their environment can run with Resolve.

What you’ll learn:

• Your true operational cost.

• Your ticket burden.

• Your automation payoff.

Reveal your ROI today.

BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT

Capturing value from physical AI

Brief: PwC published a 20-page report on physical AI, offering a guide to capturing value as AI moves into the real world, including where companies can position themselves in the emerging ecosystem.

Breakdown:

• Physical AI represents the next evolution of AI: systems that can perceive, reason about, and act within the physical world.

• Embedded in vehicles, robots, devices, and infra, these systems operate under real-world constraints while performing physical tasks.

• The report outlines seven key arenas shaping the physical AI landscape, defining how intelligent machines are deployed (image above).

• Each arena carries its own value pools and risks for leaders and firms balancing competitiveness with strategic independence.

Why it’s important: Early deployments already exist across logistics, manufacturing, mobility, healthcare, and defense. PwC estimates the combined market could reach €430 billion by 2030. The key question now is how companies position themselves across the stack to capture value.

BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT

Sovereign AI for resilience and impact

Brief: McKinsey outlined how sovereign AI can only be achieved by linking energy, compute, data, models, platforms, and applications across governments, enterprises, investors, and providers.

Breakdown:

• Sovereign AI refers to a nation’s or firms ability to control its own AI capabilities, ensuring alignment with domestic values and laws.

• Drawing on a survey of enterprises, providers, governments, and investors, McKinsey outlines the roles ecosystem actors should play.

• The report highlights partnership models that consistently outperform, and a practical roadmap for building sovereign AI capabilities.

• Sovereign AI is best viewed as a spectrum of solutions distributed across different tiers of sovereignty (image above).

Why it’s important: Governments, enterprises, and investors increasingly view control over AI capabilities as central to competitiveness, resilience, and trust. Yet despite this urgency, many sovereign AI initiatives are stalling and failing to deliver their expected results.

Deloitte released a 67-page report on the future of services, outlining an AI-first model to drive scalable ROI through smarter interactions.

Anthropic published a study on AI’s job impact, finding mass layoffs haven’t hit yet, but the youngest workers are already being squeezed out.

OpenAI outlined five AI value models driving business reinvention, from workforce empowerment and AI-native distribution to process redesign.

Microsoft published an eight-step framework for building agents, from defining the business problem to deployment, operations, and governance.

Sequoia explored why services are the new software, where model improvements make services faster, cheaper, and harder to match.

PwC published a report on agentic AI in retail, outlining the conditions and enablers required to build an enterprise ready for AI agents.

OpenAI rolled out GPT-5.4, its new top model with major gains across desktop tasks, coding, reasoning, science, math, and more.

Google released an open-source CLI for its Workspace suite, featuring 40+ built-in agent skills designed for easy integration into agentic platforms.

OpenAI is reportedly building an internal code repository to replace Microsoft’s GitHub, potentially putting it into deeper competition with its backer.

The Pentagon labeled Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” a move the company plans to challenge in court, amid reports both sides had resumed talks.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the chipmaker’s $30B OpenAI investment will likely be its last before the AI firm goes public in the future.

Google rolled out Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite, its fastest Gemini 3 model yet, delivering near-instant responses with upgraded intelligence at lower cost.

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

Capgemini Invent - AI Transformation Director

Google - Applied AI Senior Director

CrowdStrike - Vice President, Agentic Systems

EVENTS

NVIDIA - GTC 2026 - March 16-19, 2026

IDC - Driving Enterprise AI - May 3, 2026

Stanford - AI Executive Form - May 14, 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.

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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.