The success of a company’s Generative AI adoption often rests on how well the CEO sets the tone and casts the vision for the enterprise

Over the past year, awareness of Generative AI’s seemingly boundless possibilities has continued to expand. This exponential growth has instilled a growing belief among businesses and CEOs that Generative AI has the potential to significantly augment, if not substitute, even the most intricate and unstructured avenues of value creation.

But the reality of the past year is stark: There has been a lot of activity and interest, and plenty of proofs of concept and demos, and yet, a disjointed approach has prevented most companies from fully harnessing the potential of Generative AI. Moreover, the hard investment tradeoffs that CEOs have had to face have limited their ability to develop critical capabilities, including foundational technology and workforce investments. The Generative AI shift requires business leaders—most acutely, CEOs—to alter how they lead the enterprise.

Deloitte analysis has shown that successful digital transformation can result in up to $1.25 trillion (USD) in additional market cap, and Generative AI is proving to be a powerful accelerant for transformation. Over the next decade, productivity gains and capabilities enabled by AI are expected to increase global GDP by $7 trillion, while the Generative AI market doubles every other year.

CEOs can capture this value by setting the right vision, drawing their perspective from both a strategic understanding of the technology and its potential to drive value and marketplace advantage. Generative AI is much more than the evolution of a chatbot—it can be the compressed digital representation of the entire enterprise, capturing knowledge and communicating it through natural language (as opposed to programming languages). To truly capture its actual value, CEOs have an opportunity to envision how to align Generative AI to their overall business strategy, not merely in completing tasks but in reshaping the fundamental business framework.

We call this vision of the future the autonomous enterprise: a future-state organization that capitalizes on the unique advantages of pairing humans with AI to help people become far more effective and the work more fulfilling as digital agents complement and support them.

Creating this level of value through Generative AI requires CEOs to reimagine ways of working and the role of human contributions to the workplace. Articulating a compelling vision of humans with AI (the human + AI advantage) can help a CEO outpace the competition.

First and foremost, the CEO should be specific about how Generative AI can increase human employees’ skills, efficiency, and productivity, thanks to new interfaces that ease human interaction and allow for engagement through natural language.

Second, CEOs should recognize that an autonomous enterprise frees humans to focus on problems requiring a human touch. In fact, organizations competing in a marketplace where every company has access to the same Generative AI tools will likely need to rely on enduring human capabilities, such as curiosity, empathy, and creativity to create differentiation; and it will be the role of its leaders to find that “differentiation” by designing unique ways for humans and AI to interact.

To better capture value and realize the full potential of the autonomous enterprise, CEOs play a vital role in three significant areas: setting the vision, communicating it, and making the right investments to accelerate the journey toward that future.

CEOs’ most unique role is to develop and articulate a clear vision—an opportunity for a radically enhanced, augmented, and eventually automated business model that can bring value to employees, customers, and other stakeholders. But, a Generative AI-fueled enterprise will look different for each organization, and CEOs must determine the salience, as the application, speed, pace of change, and potential for advantage will vary by business.

CEOs may be inclined to take a technology and apply it directly to their business model, but Generative AI could provide CEOs the opportunity to fully reshape and redefine their business models, thinking beyond discrete use cases, pilots, and projects to scale AI in order to realize its full value.

Deloitte research shows that AI starts out in a trust deficit. When customers know a brand is using AI, their trust in the brand declines by a factor of 12. For CEOs at AI-fueled organizations, trust is imperative to building a narrative that inspires confidence in employees and customers alike.

Powerful narratives rooted in trust start with envisioning a positive future where AI enables and complements the human experience and the values of the people it serves—from how humans create, connect, and make decisions to how they consume, learn, and grow. Leaders must emphasize how their employees and customers can flourish with machines, rather than work against them.

The CEO's path to enterprise adoption should give teams confidence as well as resources and freedom to experiment, with commitments to hard investments. The journey to a Generative AI-fueled enterprise means building a foundation in digital and AI capabilities, such as technology infrastructure, for the flexibility and computing power needed to properly empower AI; data management, for feeding the organization's digital blueprint into AI models; and change management through upskilling, cultural changes, and restructuring as needed to adapt to new ways of working. That's not to mention tackling concerns around privacy, security, trust, explainability, and regulation.

It's not too late for CEOs to act—yet—on a bold vision to drive value and competitive advantage through a Generative AI-fueled organization.