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Welcome executives and professionals. Agents don't scale through technology. They scale through people, ownership, and operating discipline.

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:

• Microsoft’s agentic transformation playbook.

• The future of opex in the agent economy.

• Is software losing its head?

• Two scenarios for global AI leadership.

• Transformation and technology in the news.

• Insights for Executive+ members.

• Career opportunities & events.

Read time: 4 minutes.

BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT

Microsoft’s agentic transformation playbook

Brief: Microsoft published a 52-slide guide to selecting, scaling, and operating AI agents across the enterprise. The playbook spans six steps across four structured sections for implementation.

Breakdown:

• Understand the Assist → Execute shift and why agent initiatives require different operating models. Align adoption patterns with firm priorities.

• Use the 5×5 diagnostic to assess current state across five capability drivers. Compare against target maturity to identify scale-breakers.

• Define the right Center of Excellence model, from centralised to federated, aligned to your adoption pattern to enable scale.

• Follow a 90-day execution plan: select your pattern(s), assign ownership, identify your scale-breakers, and begin execution.

Why it’s important: You don't need a bigger model. You need a better operating model. AI agents are moving from assisting humans to executing work. This shift changes how you govern, own, and operate agents. There is no “one size fits all” framework for all agent initiatives.

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE BOARDROOM

AI blueprints you won’t find anywhere else

Brief: Dozens of CXOs, VPs, and directors are leveraging proven, step-by-step AI transformation blueprints not available elsewhere. A recent blueprint helped a Fortune 500 CAIO expand AI opportunity pipeline value by 42% and reduce projected time-to-production by 28%.

What’s inside The Boardroom:

• Executive AI transformation blueprints

• The Executive AI Index

• Full AI-native professional guides

• Extended version of Enterprise AI Executive

If you’re looking drive enterprise AI P&L impact, join us inside The Boardroom.

MARKET & BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT

The future of opex in the agent economy

Brief: Bain & Company explored the opex shift from headcount to tokens, raising questions many leadership teams are not yet asking. These are not implementation issues. They’re structural.

Breakdown:

• Many technology leaders now picture a future opex mix of 70-80% headcount and 20-30% token costs by 2028-2029.

• Executives need to find unbudgeted millions. Token spend doesn't fit a conventional line item and requires an approval chain that doesn't exist.

• Early data suggests the top 5% of users (those you can’t afford to throttle) often consume more tokens than the other 95% combined.

• What does your talent pipeline look like when teams are 3 people, not 15? How do you run a dual operating model without tearing the org apart?

Why it’s important: The question is not whether the opex shift is directionally correct, but whether organizations can survive the transition. Companies will face overlapping costs, organizational whiplash, and periods where headcount and token spend rise together before efficiencies appear.

ENTERPRISE DISRUPTION

Is software losing its head?

Brief: Andreessen Horowitz explored what happens to defensibility in software when products become headless, asking where value shifts when the UI is no longer the primary interface.

Breakdown:

• Last month Salesforce announced it would open its APIs and launch a headless product, betting that agentic value lies in the data layer.

• While marketed as new, most of these APIs already existed for years, making it more of a repositioning than a technical shift.

• The core idea is that agents access system-of-record data directly, bypassing UI workflows designed primarily for human interaction.

• Strip away the UI and expose the database, what are you left with? Do the classic factors that make systems of record durable persist?

Why it’s important: In the SaaS era, defensibility came from humans being locked into interfaces. In the agentic era, the defensible layers shift downward into data models, permissions, workflow logic, and compliance, and upward into networks, proprietary data generation, and execution.

AI-NATIVE PROFESSIONAL

How to build a daily briefing with Claude Cowork

Brief: In this guide, you’ll learn how to generate a daily briefing that pulls from Slack, Notion, and your team dashboard to surface priorities and connections you might miss scanning each platform separately.

Step-by-step:

1. In Cowork, Claude connects to Slack, Notion, and dashboards, reading conversation histories and surfacing discussions you were not part of.

2. In your prompt, define briefing structure and what counts as urgent so Cowork can prioritize across tools and teams with clear logic.

3. Cowork creates a structured briefing organized by priority, with cross-platform context synthesized into single items where relevant.

4. Move from briefing to action. Cowork drafts a reply using the thread history, related tasks, and your current priorities.

Best practice: Cowork shows which connectors are being queried in real-time. If your briefing is taking too long, check which platform is the bottleneck.

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

MARKET INSIGHT

Two scenarios for global AI leadership

Brief: Anthropic outlined its views on AI competition between the US and China, including two scenarios for what the world might look like in 2028, when it expects “transformative AI systems” to have arrived.

Breakdown:

• 1st scenario: The US defends its compute advantage, tightens export controls, disrupts China’s AI distillation, and accelerates AI adoption.

• In this world, democracies set global AI rules and norms, while engagement on safety with China becomes more likely.

• 2nd scenario: US policymakers don’t tighten compute loopholes, AI firms in China catch up to the frontier and even overtake America.

• In this world, AI norms and rules aren’t shaped by democracies, and there is little solace that this loss happened on the back of US compute.

Why it’s important: America and its allies currently approach AI competition from a position of strength, driven by a highly innovative ecosystem of firms in democratic nations. The real strategic risk is not lack of capability, but failure to coordinate policy, infrastructure, and deployment decisions fast enough.

McKinsey explored building competitive moats in the AI era and how AI is reshaping work and skills in Europe.

Anthropic published a 21-page deployment guide for Claude in the legal industry and best practices for Claude Code in large codebases.

Bain explored how autonomous shopping is redefining the customer journey as agentic AI reshapes retail economics for shoppers and agents alike.

Futurum released a 56-page report on agentic AI platforms for enterprise, highlighting vendors poised for long-term success.

WEF and Bain published a 31-page paper on AI infrastructure in the age of sovereignty and a framework for “digital embassies.”

BCG published The CEO’s Guide to Physical AI showing automation gains as robotics payback drops from five to seven years to one to three.

Gartner published its Magic Quadrant for AI Application Development Platforms with Google, AWS, Microsoft, and IBM named Leaders.

Ramp AI Index shows Anthropic leading paid plan business adoption over OpenAI for first time with rapid enterprise growth over the past year.

Anthropic introduced a monthly credit pool for Claude agent usage, restoring third-party tool support but upsetting power users again.

OpenAI rolled out Codex in ChatGPT iOS preview across plans, enabling devs to manage long-running AI tasks directly from their phones.

Cerebras officially went public, with its stock more than doubling from its open just hours into trading and marking the biggest IPO of the year so far.

Microsoft introduced MDASH, an AI security harness that chains 100+ specialized agents to hunt for software bugs.

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

OpenAI - Executive Transformation Lead

Cognizant - Enterprise AI Director

Wipro - AI Strategic Advisor

EVENTS

Google - Agentic AI Infrastructure - May 19, 2026

Capgemini–Forrester - Agentic AI Integration - May 28, 2026

SAP - Scale Enterprise AI Agents - June 10, 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.