The five AI shifts every CEO should prepare for
The five AI shifts every CEO should prepare for
https://www.forbes.com.au/news/leadership/the-five-ai-shifts-every-ceo-should-prepare-for/
Publish Date: 2026-06-29 18:28:00
Source Domain: www.forbes.com.au
Published on
June 30, 2026
Opinion: Most organisations are still optimising for the last phase of AI. These five shifts explain why yesterday’s playbook is rapidly becoming obsolete and what business leaders should do next, writes Lucio Ribeiro
CEOs need to be aware of the next wave of AI change. Image: Getty Images.
A few weeks ago, I stood in front of 30 senior business leaders at The Marketing Academy Fellowship and walked them through AiMOT, the AI Moment of Truth: the point in a customer journey where someone meets artificial intelligence before they meet a human, a brand, or a product.
I made the case that AI-driven discovery is the biggest change to customer experience in fifteen years. In the crowd were people running multi-million-dollar businesses, and the idea, and its newness, clearly landed with all of them.
Then it struck me. This concept didn’t exist one year ago. A room of seasoned operators was nodding at something that had gone from non-existent to boardroom-relevant in under twelve months.
That is the real condition of AI right now. The important shifts are either moving too fast to track or sitting too high to see, until they’ve already reshaped the industry around you. By the time a pattern is obvious, it’s already behind you. What follows below is a map. Five structural shifts already in motion in 2026, grounded in what’s happening in the AI industry now.
What I noticed is that each one punishes a behaviour the last three years rewarded. And each one points at the same buried question: whether the way your organisation is built still fits the technology arriving. In twelve months, these will be the conditions everyone is operating inside.
Shift one: the subsidy era is ending
For three years, AI companies priced products to grow, not to profit. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google absorbed the real cost of compute to acquire…
