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Welcome executives and professionals. For boards of directors, AI is moving from an agenda item to a boardroom tool. But boardroom adoption is uneven, and very much still maturing.

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:

• How boards are using AI.

• How CEOs scale AI value.

• America’s open-model paradox.

• How Anthropic secures its SDLC.

• Transformation and technology in the news.

• Insights for Executive+ members.

• Career opportunities & events.

Read time: 4 minutes.

MARKET INSIGHT

How boards are using AI

Brief: Deloitte surveyed 106 companies (92 public, 14 private) to map out where boards stand today on AI use. Findings reveal sizable gaps in boardroom AI adoption, alongside signs of progress.

Breakdown:

• Many companies have not formally enabled AI/GenAI for board use, with 47% of public companies not expressly supporting its use.

• Boards using AI/GenAI mainly apply it to administrative tasks like reviewing reports, and oversight work such as scenario planning.

• Organizations more often build AI capability via board meeting education sessions (77%) than recruitment (14%) or board evaluations (4%)

• 51% of respondents report no board-specific AI policies. Where they exist, focus areas include security, confidentiality, and acceptable use.

Why it’s important: Boards are at an inflection point. AI can enhance governance effectiveness and decision-making, but only if directors and management establish clear guardrails, build competence, and preserve the judgment and accountability that defines strong oversight.

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH RESOLVE

IT automation that pays for itself

Brief: Half your ticket volume is the same problems solved the same way, quietly draining budget. Resolve's agentic automation and orchestration maps every failure path and executes the fix before a ticket ever opens.

The Resolve Platform edge:

• Repeat incidents resolved autonomously before a ticket is ever created

• Failure paths mapped and orchestrated across the entire IT estate

• Engineering hours and budget returned to work that grows the business

Calculate your ROI → Zero Touch Resolution Calculator.

MARKET & BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT

How CEOs scale AI value

Brief: BCG found that nine in ten CEOs say their companies now see cost or revenue benefits from AI in targeted areas. To build on that momentum and unlock value at scale, enterprises can adapt proven transformation disciplines.

Breakdown:

• The opportunity now is to scale early wins into bigger P&L impact. To understand how, BCG compared high-performers with low performers.

• High performing CEOs report cost cuts of at least 10% or revenue growth of 5%, versus under 5% reduction or 2% growth for low performers.

• In line with BCG's client experience, results show high performers focus on a clear set of measures that lead to better outcomes.

• These CEOs set overall ambition and oversight, assign top people to priority AI initiatives, and track financial value through to the bottom line.

Why it’s important: Many CEOs already understand the importance of these moves: they are the transformation disciplines companies have used to implement other large change programs. The challenge is executing them with the rigor, speed, and accountability that AI requires.

MARKET INSIGHT

America’s open-model paradox

Brief: Sequoia, the venture capital firm, examined how Western AI companies increasingly depend on Chinese open models like Qwen as teachers and training bases, since using American frontier model outputs that way is prohibited. 

Breakdown:

• Qwen's share of open-model fine-tunes jumped from 1% to 69% from 2024 to 2026, with many American firms leveraging Chinese weights. 

• Thinking Machines pre-trained Inkling, the top US open model, in house, but bootstrapped fine-tuning on synthetic Kimi K2.5 data.

• The point is that a Western lab had a legal path to learn from a Chinese open model, while equivalent use of GPT or Claude outputs is prohibited.

• Western builders must build capabilities independently or wait on the next Chinese release, giving Chinese labs a structural advantage. 

Why it's important: A Western firm can download a Chinese model, then run and modify that version indefinitely. But AI capability is an upgrade cycle, and each new Qwen, Kimi, or DeepSeek is a stronger base. If China stops releasing its best models, firms that depend on them risk falling behind.

AI-NATIVE PROFESSIONAL

How to update a financial model with Claude

Brief: In this guide, you'll learn how to use Claude Cowork to pull a company's earnings release and call transcript from S&P Global, check them against your financial model, and pass flagged cells straight to Excel and PowerPoint.

Step-by-step:

1. In Cowork, Claude pulls the earnings release and call transcript for the reporting company through the S&P Global connector.

2. Claude reads your model from the attached folder and flags where your own forecast diverged from the actual earnings print .

3. You take Claude's brief into Claude for Excel, review the flagged cells, and make only the edits that are warranted.

4. Open the deck in Claude for PowerPoint, where the carried-over conversation already knows what you changed in Excel.

Best practice: Save the recurring post-earnings workflow as a reusable skill so that next quarter's update starts in one single click.

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

BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT

How Anthropic secures its SDLC

Brief: Anthropic Deputy CISO Jason Clinton detailed how the Security Engineering team secures a software development lifecycle (SDLC) in which Claude authors 80% of merged code.

Breakdown:

• Anthropic's code volume and velocity have scaled exponentially: engineers ship 8x as much code per quarter as they did from 2021 to 2025.

• Development processes changed alongside it: Claude has moved from coding assistant to primary author and reviewer of the codebase. 

• Security teams must defend a fast-expanding surface area and harden a lifecycle built around non-deterministic, evolving agents.

• Defenses include hard identity and access boundaries to contain the blast radius, human review at the highest-leverage points, and more.

Why it’s important: As AI increasingly writes and reviews code, security teams should shift from checking bugs to monitoring the loops and identities behind them. Anthropic's layered approach preserves speed and accountability while scaling defenses against AI-era threats.

Accenture explored the leadership practices that turn AI ambition into enterprise value, notably curiosity, courage and connection.

Deloitte published a CFO guide to AI value realization, alongside a survey finding just 43% of CFOs feel confident in their AI governance.

Bain published two briefs: one on rearchitecting enterprise data platforms for AI, another on building the AI-native modern bank.

TCS, with Google Cloud, published a 35-page physical AI readiness report on building the foundations for future-ready manufacturing.

Google Cloud released its state of AI infrastructure report, noting that 83% of firms believe they need upgrades to support production agentic AI.

U.S. Department of State published a 39-page generative AI playbook including how StateChat scaled to 62,000 users agencywide.

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5, a model that comes close to frontier intelligence of Claude Fable 5 at half the price.

OpenAI debuted Presence, an enterprise product for deploying customer-facing chat and voice agents, powering its own support desk.

NVIDIA and 24 other firms published a letter opposing premature curbs on open-weight models; signatories have since doubled to ~50.

Hugging Face’s breach, disclosed with no culprit named, was later traced to OpenAI's own GPT-5.6 Sol plus an unreleased model.

OpenAI moved GPT-Live voice into its desktop app and Codex, while Anthropic plugged Claude's voice into smarter models and apps.

The US accused China's Moonshot AI of distilling Anthropic's Fable for its K3 model via a platform built for large-scale extraction.

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

OpenAI - Executive Innovation Lead, AI Transformation

U.S. Bank - AI Transformation Leader

NTT DATA - Senior AI Transformation Deal Executive

EVENTS

Snowflake-AWS - Agentic Intelligence - July 29, 2026

SAP - High Impact AI use Cases - August 19, 2026

KPMG - Edge AI Business Value - August 20, 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.