At Stanford Graduate School of Business this month, Dr. Lamia Youseff, CEO, JC12.ai and ex-AI Executive at Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft, spoke with Alex Dang, Senior Advisor, McKinsey and former Amazon AI leader. The Intelligent Leader: How to Survive in an AI-Defined Decade, presented a strategic map for future leaders at GSB on the trajectory of generative and agentic
As AI is here to stay, don't lose your competitive edge.
The speakers highlighted the transformation and advancement of AI from earlier symbolic systems to the tipping point in 2022 for GenAI in ChatGPT. Dr. Youseff indicated that AI is increasingly becoming a part of leadership and product development and talent strategy. To put it in her words, “inaction is the new risk.”.
A New Leadership Stack: Mastering the AI Value Chain
Dr. Youseff uses decades of executive experience to introduce the AI value chain as a new strategic stack, from data readiness to model experimentation, vertical applications, and trust frameworks. She said leaders shouldn’t just understand AI—they should design organizations for it. Leadership in the intelligence era is all about asking better questions. Both speakers challenged the audience to change their mind. As knowledge becomes more automated, the leaders of the future will be those who ask the right question, form cross-disciplinary teams, and experiment intelligently.
The session closed with a call to action: embrace AI as a co-strategist, not just a tool. Intelligent leaders will combine human intuition with machine capabilities to solve bigger problems, faster.