Your Next Competitive Advantage Isn't AI: It's AI Adoption
- claire3291
- 10 hours ago
- 7 min read
Key summary points
Insights from CEO Summit 2026, Sydney, featuring Verne Harnish (Scaling Up), Shuya Gong (Harvard Innovation Labs) and Craig Scroggie (NextDC)
Why AI adoption — not AI tools — is the defining competitive advantage for scaling businesses right now
How people and leadership shapes an organisation's success and readiness to adopt AI
How the Scaling Up Four Decisions — People, Strategy, Execution and Cash — map directly to AI adoption.
How to avoid a Kodak Moment as a leader of a growth-stage company today.
When Verne Harnish, Founder and CEO of Scaling Up, opened the recent CEO Summit in Sydney, he didn't start with AI. He started with something much more fundamental.
For more than four decades, Verne has helped thousands of companies scale. His message: great companies don't scale because they are lucky. They scale because they continuously improve four critical decisions: People, Strategy, Execution and Cash. And all four matter to successful scaling.
Then he posed a really simple question:
"What is dumb about your industry?"
It was a question that sat beneath many of the examples he shared. IKEA challenged the assumption that furniture had to be assembled before it left the factory and stored before purchase. Amazon challenged the friction of buying online and economics of last mile delivery. SpaceX challenged the assumption that rockets are to be discarded after a single launch.
Dumb, dumb and dumber. But same for everyone in that industry.
Innovation, Verne reminded us, often begins by identifying something customers have simply accepted as normal and asking what if it wasn't.
When I had previously heard this story, it felt like an inspiring story about strategy.
By the end of the Summit, it felt like the most important question every CEO should be asking about their industry or business. Alongside it:
"How can AI help us stop doing dumb things?"
Then Shuya Gong from Harvard Engineering, Harvard Innovation Labs and IDEO, took the stage. She showed us just how dramatically the nature of work is changing, but how most of leaders are focused on the are focused on the wrong challenge.
They are asking which AI tools are the best to use. But the real challenge is more human, and it relates to our personal deeply held beliefs and opinions about AI and how it will afffect our work, role and life.
How safe do we feel using autonomous robots to fold our laundry or autonomous cars to drive our kids to school? How much would we trust AI in highly risky, highly regulated industries like food or health? Are we looking forward to AI helping us to do more with our time in role or are we worried it will simply replace us? All the news and noise is not helpful.
We all hold our own beliefs about where AI and technology should start and stop. Individual psychological safety feeds into organisational readiness.
But AI doesn't replace our Why - it replaces our How.
Shuya's AI-adoption framework described a journey an organisation must take for adoption - from data readiness to people readiness to market readiness. Along the way she made an observation that resonated deeply with the CEOs in the room:
"The functional jobs to be done will get cheaper and faster. The emotional jobs to be done will be where value is differentiated."
In a world where AI will increasingly handle functions e.g. analysis, reporting, drafting and routine tasks, processes and rules-based decision-making (assuming all organisations will have equal access!), human value shifts toward judgement, leadership, creativity, trust, orchestration, governance and relationships.
The implication for CEOs and their teams is important.
AI adoption is not primarily a technology initiative. Yes, proprietary data, processes, value delivery, deep expertise in our function, market and industry, is the unique IP we bring to AI.
Yet adoption is inherantly a people initiative.
Every employee will need to learn how to work effectively alongside AI.
Every leader will need to rethink their organisational roles, workflows and capabilities.
And every organisation will need to decide where human expertise PLUS AI creates the greatest value.
Then came Craig Scroggie, CEO of Next DC. As a Scaling Up implementor for over a decade, NextDC continues to use Scaling Up to scale to more than $10 billion in enterprise value.
As Craig stepped out on the stage, I think many of us expected to learn about Data Centres - the infrastructure that underpins AI transformation.
Instead, Craig delivered one of the most thought-provoking leadership presentations of the Summit.
His message was about the future of the organisation itself and the importance of the CEO to lead the change.
One slide in particular captured everyone's attention:
"Your org chart is the bug, not the model."
Meaning AI is not a bolt-on to your current org structure, but is redefining org structures entirely.
He challenged us to imagine a future where every knowledge worker manages ten agents. Where the most valuable skill is not coding, but designing, governing and validating agent systems. Where organisations compete not on access to AI, but on how effectively they deploy it.
Historically, humans executed work and software supported them.
Increasingly, humans will orchestrate while agents execute.
Craig argued that "we have crossed from prompts to production."
And the question is not what AI can do, but what your organisation can now do that it could not before.
Craig's own organisational goal was 40+ agents in 90 days, prioritising those that provide the most leverage to value creation. To execute on this, he brings together the top 100 power users of AI from across his business units for weekly meetings to share their learnings and what they have built.
Suddenly Verne's question came back into focus.
What is dumb about your industry?
What is slow, manual, repetitive, frustrating or unnecessarily expensive?
What would happen if you redesigned that process from scratch using AI and agents?
This is where the three keynote speakers converged.
Verne taught us that great companies scale through the Four Decisions: People, Strategy, Execution and Cash.
Shuya showed us that AI adoption is a progressive challenge starting with internal data, to people and culture and and then our customers and market.
Craig demonstrated that the organisations that win will be adaptive. They will redesign workflows, business models and org structures, rethink roles and operating models around AI. And they will do it by experimentation, intent from CEO and learning faster than competitors.
Together, they point to a simple conclusion.
My Take: AI is not a Fifth Decision. It is an accelerator of all Four Decisions.
For People, AI can become a thought-partner, assistant and capability multiplier.
For example:
take away hours of repetitive work every week such as generating functional reports, analysing data, developing meeting agendas and note-taking, updating playbooks and handbooks and communicating updates to regulation and compliance.
help onboard talent faster, shortening the time to value through centralising intelligence such as common FAQs, providing always on access to subject matter experts and even the founder's experience.
give people more resources to achieve their goals and the company purpose with better quality and quantity of output, making it easier to scale their output without their hours.
for human capital intensive or services businesses, which are typically more challenging to scale economically, like consulting, IT services and agencies, it can unlock scalability and profitability by reducing time to support repeatabl
For Strategy, it can unlock;
faster turnaround and access to deeper customer intelligence for every function in the organisation to deliver on customer brand promises.
identify improvements to customer experiences and avenues for product or service innovation.
acting as a strategic thought partner, Advisory Board or world's greatest coach, helping to level up the thinking of the CEO and leadership team for better decision-making, surfacing non-obvious strategic issues or opportunities to solve probelsm that a small leadership team are unlikely to generate in isolation.
For Execution, it can improve speed and effectiveness through:
levelling up sales and marketing effectiveness, researching at target clients at scale ahead of sales meetings and personalising the approach.
rapid development of sales and marketing collateral, websites, campaign development and follow up communication.
redesign of key value creating workflows to speed up human elements and elevate those involved from implementation to decisions maker and orchestration.
accelerate organisational adaptability and learning with a disciplined communication cadence.
For Cash, it can improve identify non-obvious opportunities to:
improve margin, profit, cash
collect payments and fix mistakes like over-payments or paying for unused subscriptions.
improve accuracy of forecasting by business unit leaders
simplifying reporting to non-financial leaders and identifying things we just don't see today.
act as a thought-partner on capital allocation to improve returns to working capital and investment decisions.
The next competitive advantage isn't AI. It's AI adoption.
After hearing the experts on stage at the CEO Summit and listening to the CEOs in the room, I'm convinced the companies that gain the greatest advantage will not be those with the most AI tool sprawl. It will be the organisations that learn how to create the most value and adopt AI fastest in their organisation.
That is why I believe AI adoption has become one of the CEO's most important responsibilities. Investing in AI-reskilling of our people is as important for our organisations as it is for our society as a whole.
Not because AI is addressing a challenge by replacing people. The short-term lens of speculator investors may respond to this lens.
But because there is an immense opportunity to scale like never before and leaders must now help every person in their organisation develop the skills, confidence and capability to work effectively and safely with AI.
And in my view - that is the bigger Kodak moment facing every CEO and company today.
Comments