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Welcome executives and professionals. From 2018 to 2025, AI model capability growth outpaced computing throughput by 500,000x, driving a new generation of AI disruptors.

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:

• The new generation of AI disruptors.

• How token economics will change opex.

• The 2026 state of AI coding report.

• Everything is recorded now.

• Transformation and technology in the news.

• Insights for Executive+ members.

• Career opportunities & events.

Read time: 4 minutes.

MARKET & BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT

The new generation of AI disruptors

Brief: BCG analyzed 1,000 US private firms in software and physical AI, computing hardware, and quantum, identifying three traits among firms disrupting the status quo and attracting customers, investors, and valuations.

Breakdown:

• Distruptors pair autonomous AI with domain expertise and adjust business models to focus on outcomes rather than user scale (e.g. Sierra).

• Rather than refining existing architecture, they build new systems that cut cost, latency, and decision-making speed (e.g. Glean).

• They read and act on video and other unstructured data, turning formerly underused assets into workflow intelligence (e.g. ElevenLabs)

• Among the top 100 US private firms, physical AI, hardware, and quantum now rank with software as the largest value pools (image above).

Why it’s important: For enterprises, disruptors present ways of working that were not possible before. Engage initially to grasp their value, run a proof of concept, then move fast to full deployment. If your metrics don't lead the industry, you haven’t taken AI-enabled disruptive solutions far enough.

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE BOARDROOM

AI blueprints you won’t find anywhere else

Brief: Last quarter's boardroom blueprint helped a Fortune 500 CAIO grow its AI pipeline value 42% and cut projected time-to-production 28%. On June 29, members receive the next: Selling the $10M AI transformation.

What’s inside The Boardroom:

• A new AI transformation blueprint every quarter

• The Executive AI Index

• AI-native professional guides

• Extended version of Enterprise AI Executive

Join before June 29 to get this quarter's blueprint.

BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT & CASE STUDIES

How token economics will change opex

Brief: Bain released part 2 of its token economics series exploring why effective cost per task stays stubbornly flat despite falling model prices, and the practical moves to navigate the nonlinear shift from headcount to tokens.

Breakdown:

• In part I, Bain laid out how agents, tokens, and data could replace 20% to 30% of headcount opex by 2028, with no clear transition.

• Despite falling model prices, spend stays high as usage scales, agent work grows more complex, and firms default to frontier models.

• Bain outlines variables that could shift this, from token-cost trends and on-premises inference to rightsizing models to tasks.

• It then offers five moves for enterprises to manage costs, from a dedicated AI compute line item to metering the token cost of tasks.

Why it’s important: The opex shift from headcount to tokens isn't a budget problem; it's a structural transformation. The economics are unsettled and the path nonlinear. That's not a reason to wait, but to navigate the shift now, so when the curve breaks you act on hard data instead of intuition.

MARKET INSIGHT

The 2026 state of AI coding report

Brief: New Relic, the observability platform, commissioned a 2026 Hanover Research survey of 200 US decision-makers in IT and engineering, all at organizations that use generative AI for software development.

Breakdown:

• Two-thirds (67%) say AI now writes or refactors 51 to 75% of weekly code, leaving the median codebase mostly non-human.

• Upside: feature delivery is faster, deployment frequency up, and most leaders rate AI code higher quality than human code.

• The downside: production incidents, technical debt, microservice sprawl, and senior-engineer rework time have all risen.

• Common AI code production failures (integration, compliance, data integrity, and security) have affected 30% of firms in the past six months.

Why it’s important: New Relic published this study because it answers the questions most engineering organizations now face. The data shows that AI-generated software is here, its operational consequences are real, and observability has become the layer where they are managed.

AI-NATIVE PROFESSIONAL

How to create onboarding guides with Claude

Brief: In this guide, you'll learn how to use Claude to turn standard company information and a new hire's specific details into a personalized welcome guide that helps new employees feel prepared and ready from their first day.

Step-by-step:

1. Tell Claude about the new hire (name, role, start date, team, manager) and point it to your standard company information.

2. Ask Claude to create a first-week guide that brings everything together, so the new hire can quickly find what they need.

3. Claude blends your standard company information with the new hire's details into a single, welcoming onboarding guide.

4. Generate personalized versions for multiple recipients at once, each tailored to that person's role, team, or context.

Best practice: Upload your brand guidelines or website screenshots so Claude matches your color schemes, typography, and design style.

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

MARKET & BEST PRACTICE INSIGHT

Everything is recorded now

Brief: a16z explored one of the biggest ways AI is transforming work, and one of the most taboo subjects inside firms right now: most work discussions are being recorded by default, creating a living record of how a company runs.

Breakdown:

• From a technology perspective, it’s clear that a new kind of system of record is going to get built out of this living company context.

• The key insight: onboard AI as you would an employee. You don't just send a new hire to pore over the CRM or wiki to ramp up.

• You invite them to meetings to learn by osmosis, since meetings are where culture, expectations, and edge cases all live.

• That's the unwritten context for how a firm actually runs. AI works the same way, only it reasons over every interaction and never tires.

Why it’s important: Ultimately, this latent context is what will empower AI agents to do more productive work across companies, and that promise of AI productivity is going to dramatically outweigh any fear or prior cultural norms in most enterprises.

BCG detailed five questions CEOs should ask to turn AI upskilling into business performance, noting 60%+ of firms report little to no AI ROI.

EY argued token costs are just the visible tip of agentic AI's seven cost categories, encouraging firms to adopt Agent FinOps rigor.

KPMG detailed five data readiness gaps (searchability, context, trust, governance, and ownership) keeping enterprise AI in pilot mode.

Forrester detailed how Fable 5 and Mythos 5 change vendor risk, with mandatory 30-day retention voiding zero-retention contracts.

McKinsey distilled seven operating truths of AI-native companies and outlined five shifts resetting Europe's AI-driven e-commerce.

PVAI published its AIMS white paper, a framework to make AI amplification practical and repeatable for marketers rewiring teams.

Anthropic disabled Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all foreign users after a US government export-control order citing national-security concerns.

OpenAI launched three new OpenAI Academy courses teaching AI foundations, applied AI foundations, and agents and workflows.

Microsoft restricted employee access to the Fable model due to Anthropic’s policy requiring all chats be retained up to 30 days.

OpenAI is weighing steep token price cuts to compete with Anthropic, setting up a potential price war between rival AI leaders.

SpaceX previewed AI1, a solar-powered satellite built to run AI chips in orbit, days before its record-breaking IPO on June 12.

Anthropic's first Public Record survey of 52,000 Americans found 64% fear AI job loss and just 15% trust AI firms to make decisions about how AI is used.

CAREER OPPORTUNITIES

Samsung - AI Strategy Leader

AstraZeneca - Senior Director, AI Transformation

Citi - Managing Director, Head of AI

EVENTS

OpenAI Marketing with Codex - June 25, 2026

CDAO Enterprise AI - September 23, 2026

The AI Conference - Sept 29-Oct 1, 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.