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Welcome executives and professionals. Already today, agents are being embedded across enterprises at a scale that could only have been imagined a year ago.

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:

• Palantir: Governing AI agents.

• Selecting the right cloud for agentic AI.

• A stronger CIO for the AI-first era.

• The AI-first operating system.

• Transformation and technology in the news.

• Insights for Executive+ members.

• Career opportunities & events.

Read time: 4 minutes.

BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT

Palantir: Governing AI agents

Brief: Palantir highlighted the gap between agentic performance, safety, and reliability in theoretical versus enterprise settings, and how firms can understand and improve results if agents fall short of expectations.

Breakdown:

• Robust governance infrastructure for evaluating enterprise AI agents is essential to ensuring agent performance, safety, and reliability.

• Palantir sorts the governance capabilities that should sit at the core of the AI system into two layers: controls and workflows.

• Governance controls form the foundation: authorization workflows, bounded execution, testing, evaluation, observability, and fail-safe modes.

• Governance workflows build on those mechanisms so users can realize their aims: human-agentic collaboration and lifecycle development.

Why it’s important: Palantir draws these insights from deploying its software across enterprises and institutions for mission-critical outcomes. Built atop existing governance processes, the practices help guide how leaders and policymakers approach AI oversight and regulation.

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH ASAPP

Agentic customer experience built for resolution

Brief: Resolve customer issues in a one contained, always-on experience where customers never wait and context is never lost. ASAPP Customer Experience Platform (CXP) unifies AI agents, humans, and enterprise operations into an agentic system.

At its core ASAPP CXP can:

• Execute across systems to resolve issues without escalation

• Embed human expertise into real-time AI resolution through HILA™

• Protect your brand with enterprise-grade guardrails, data protection, and continuous quality monitoring and improvement

Learn more about ASAPP CXP.

BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT

Selecting the right cloud for agentic AI

Brief: BCG explored how cloud service provider (CSP) procurement, once negotiated on headline pricing and contract leverage, has become a strategic platform decision shaping innovation velocity, governance, and cost.

Breakdown:

• AI's workload-specific economics force enterprises to apply different selection criteria spanning three linked but distinct CSP choices.

• The first is model choice: which foundation models or managed model experiences to use for priority tasks (image above).

• Second, workload architecture: whether to use modular pipelines, like separate vision and text, or integrated multimodal approaches.

• Third, the control-plane choice: where to accept vendor lock-in on orchestration, memory, observability, guardrails, and connectors.

Why it’s important: Leaders who own these cloud AI decisions: CEOs setting strategic direction, CFOs modeling AI economics, and CIOs and CTOs designing the architecture, must not conflate these choices or optimize on headline token prices. Those who do will over-spend, under-govern, or both.

BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT

A stronger CIO for the AI-first era

Brief: BCG outlined how the CIO mandate in many organizations still reflects the priorities of the digital era, and why governing how a firm uses AI to build solutions, at what cost, and for what purpose demands a stronger CIO.

Breakdown:

• In the AI-first era, technology becomes too easy to create, too fragmented to govern, too costly to run, and too complex to renew.

• CIOs clinging to the old IT-delivery monopoly lose relevance; those orchestrating enterprise intelligence earn a broader mandate.

• They shape the C-suite agenda, define value paths, manage digital labor, codify context, embed controls, and keep estates resilient.

• BCG argues CIOs must also lead the human side, defining new roles, new skills, and new measures of success (image above).

Why it’s important: In some organizations, this mandate will be shared across the CIO, CIDO, CDO, and CTO; the title matters less than making AI a business priority and building foundations that let it scale safely. The enterprise becomes AI-first only when leaders orchestrate intent, not scarcity.

AI-NATIVE PROFESSIONAL

How to understand and extend an inherited spreadsheet

Brief: In this guide, you'll learn how to understand an inherited spreadsheet's existing formulas and structure, then add new data while preserving the original logic, conventions, and underlying assumptions.

Step-by-step:

1. Inherited spreadsheets carry hidden complexity: formulas referencing formulas, buried assumptions, and calculations that cascade.

2. Claude reads your spreadsheet's formulas and any existing documentation, then explains what it finds before you extend the model.

3. Claude annotates the spreadsheet itself, adding cell comments that explain complex formulas, document assumptions, and flag unclear logic.

4. Once you understand the structure, Claude extends the model from your prompts, following original conventions.

Best practice: Ask Claude to add sparklines or charts beside key metrics. Stakeholders instantly see spikes, dips, and segment trends at a glance.

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

BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT & CASE STUDIES

The AI-first operating system

Brief: The World Economic Forum, with Kearney and drawing on insights from more than 50 leading organizations, published a 52-page report on how AI-first enterprises are rethinking business models, workflows, and decision-making.

Breakdown:

• AI-first success rests on five blocks: intelligence engines, adaptive stacks, redesigned operations, human-AI teaming, new value.

• AI-first and AI-native firms are showing speed, scale, and leverage, but which model proves dominant over time is not yet clear.

• For incumbents, the question is not whether to become AI-first but how fast and where to start. The window is open, but not forever.

• Case studies from Indeed, Gamma, and Cognizant show how firms embed intelligence at scale to unlock innovation and productivity.

Why it’s important: The challenge is not to assume a single operating model, but to build capacity to learn and adapt. The report recommends running parallel models, AI-first alongside existing, and measuring the difference to find where intelligence creates real advantage.

OpenAI published a 26-page white paper showing how Codex sustains long-running work via durable threads, memory, tools, and review.

McKinsey argued marketing must become a continuous growth engine built on five capabilities, from insights to orchestration.

Forrester found Google overtook rivals as agencies' top partner and argued agencies must shift from execution to orchestration.

McKinsey examined why AI voice agents fail at scale and evolved its Talent to Value framework for human-agent teams.

Google DeepMind published a 36-page framework urging policymakers to secure agents across three layers: individual, multi-agent, and cyber defense.

Bain published a brief warning quantum will beat classical systems on complex problems by 2029, so leaders should build readiness now.

Anthropic launched Claude Tag, allowing teams to tag @Claude in Slack like a team member to delegate tasks while they focus on other work.

Gartner predicted neocloud providers will capture 20% of the $267 billion AI cloud market by 2030 amid surging enterprise AI demand.

OpenAI expanded its Daybreak cyber program, adding a Codex Security plugin, the GPT-5.5-Cyber model, and a 'Patch the Planet' push.

SpaceX signed a computing power deal with Reflection AI for access to Nvidia GB300 chips at its Colossus 2 data center.

Beansprout published a 17-page report mapping China's four-layer AI stack, from SMIC chips to Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent cloud, models, and apps.

Five Eyes cyber agencies released a warning that AI is changing cyber risk in 'months, not years,' urging execs to harden defenses.

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

OpenAI - Head of Deal Strategy

BNY - Applied AI Senior Vice President

C3 AI - Chief Information Officer

EVENTS

EY-Hypatos - AI Agents in Finance - July 7, 2026

Gartner - AI Agents for CIOs - July 22, 2026

Microsoft - AI Customer Service - July 23, 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.