How one CEO used AI to scale himself
Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
CEOs appear to love artificial intelligence (AI). Nearly 95% of chief executives and founders running Inc. 5000 companies—the fastest-growing privately held businesses in the U.S.—say they are optimistic about AI’s potential to run their operations. That’s up from 91% who held that same opinion in 2024. Nearly two-thirds of CEOs surveyed by IBM say they currently are adopting AI agents—software that autonomously performs tasks.
CEOs still on the AI fence
But many CEOs—present company included—are lagging when it comes to adopting AI in their personal and professional routines. When I recently sought responses from global CEOs on how they use generative AI to do their jobs, the only leaders who responded were entrepreneurs and tech executives. The New York Times recently published a piece highlighting the deficiencies of AI usage in corner offices. “AI is weird and off-putting,” Ethan Mollick, an AI expert and professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told The Times. “There’s a lot of psychological resistance to using the systems even for people who know they should be doing it.”
So, I was pleased when Jim O’Leary, Weber Shandwick’s North America CEO and global president, agreed to talk about his AI journey. Weber Shandwick is a 4,000-person communications consultancy, and O’Leary advises CEOs on navigating business issues, including AI adoption and usage. Turning the office of the CEO into “an experimentation test bed” enhances Weber Shandwick’s credibility with clients. “If I’m going to advise clients, I need to be able to master for myself what I’m advising them on,” he says. “Having done it for ourselves, it puts us in a position to be able to show versus just tell.”
Leadership’s lab experiment
O’Leary says he started the process about six months ago by assembling his executive administrator, his chief of staff, Weber Shandwick’s chief innovation officer, and a technologist to discuss what they ultimately wanted AI to enable. They decided that they wanted a tool that could summarize meetings securely; a system that could gather and prioritize information such as news and research; and a repository for all that knowledge but also Weber Shandwick’s library of press releases, presentations, CEO memos, and more. They also wanted AI agents that could automatically generate specific projects and a way for all the software to work together. Maintaining privacy, confidentiality, and security protocols was table stakes.
Building this AI innovation ecosystem has involved considerable up-front work and some customization, but the end result, O’Leary says, is a system that automatically processes, summarizes, and prioritizes the information he needs to do his job. And while his administrative assistant and chief of staff still review much of what the system creates for him, O’Leary says the output keeps getting better.
Scaling the CEO
O’Leary says this AI-powered approach has also allowed him to essentially scale himself. “Knowledge doesn’t just live in my head or inbox,” he says. “It exists in a widely accessible way that informs our work and systems.” For an all-hands email, for example, O’Leary’s writing agent—which is accessible to everyone in the CEO office—is capable of producing a high-quality draft tapping the central repository for relevant meeting notes, timely articles he’s saved via a news curation platform, and his library of memos (to get his writing style and tone right).
I asked O’Leary if he’s contemplated creating a chatbot that employees could query instead of coming to him for answers. (Nearly half of CEOs surveyed in 2023 by online learning company edX said “most” or “all” their work could be replaced by AI.) He says he hasn’t turned himself into a bot, but Weber Shandwick employees do have access to a proprietary platform called Halo, whose AI agents leverage the consultancy’s intellectual property to produce client-specific press releases, proposals, and more.
O’Leary says his office’s embrace of AI has, in turn, stoked employee usage of AI software. “I think it’s empowering the team,” he says.
These tools are also giving the CEO the most valuable return: time. O’Leary estimates he’s saving one to two hours per day, which he can reinvest in higher-value activities. He says he now has “more time for blue-sky thinking, more time for leadership development of my team on AI. Perhaps above all, maybe I get to spend a little more time with my kids.”
How do you use AI?
As a CEO, are you leading by example on AI? What are some of the ways you’ve deployed AI, and what are you doing with the time you’re getting back? Send your examples to me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. I’ll feature some of the most compelling case studies in a future newsletter.
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