AI For the C Suite® with Chad Harvey

What do you believe? Two conversations keep arising when AI is discussed. The first focuses on the people building AI who are confident the next 36 months will reshape knowledge work. The second is typified by sharp, well-read clients who believe that it's simply a better search engine and the rest is hype. Chad's view is that the distance between those two positions is a signal, and he calls it the belief gap. In this episode he argues it sits upstream of the three gaps he has tracked before. These are the gap between what the technology can do and how fast organizations change, the gap between bleeding edge companies and conservative ones in the same industry, and the gap inside a single company between the few who have rebuilt their work around AI and the many who haven't. If you don't believe something is coming, you don't adopt it, and your organization never has to change. Both camps are partly right. Builders have the stronger record on what the technology will do next, but they underestimate how slowly budgets, incentives, habits, and trust move. Your Tuesday experience tells you what's in your building today, not what's coming. Leslie Nielsen makes a cameo along the way. For middle market leaders, that tension is an opening. A Fortune 500 company has to clear procurement and legal review before anyone touches a tool. You can put one in someone's hands next week. Chad closes with a three-step, 90-day move. Name one knowledge-work process and one capable person, measure the before and after in hours, errors, and cycle time, then decide from the evidence which side of the gap you're on. The cost is a couple thousand dollars and one person's attention. You'll leave with a clearer way to separate what the technology can do from how fast your company can absorb it, and a starting point you can run this quarter. One question to carry in: when did you last change your mind about what AI can do? AI For the C Suite™ podcast keeps C-Suite leaders informed and engaged in the world of AI for business. If you're a CEO, President, Owner, or C-suite leader looking to understand how AI will impact your organization, you've found the right podcast.  https://aiforthecsuite.com/#chadharvey #aiforthecsuite #aic

Who owns AI in your organization—and what does ownership actually involve? Chad Harvey welcomes Matt Symes, CEO of Symplicity Designs, to AI for the C-Suite to explore the leadership, workforce, and financial questions behind AI adoption. Matt runs a portfolio of nine companies across Atlantic Canada. In the AI transformations he leads, AI reports to HR rather than IT. His argument: when you redesign a workflow around people and machines, you change the skills, responsibilities, and team structure needed to create value. The conversation examines what happens when organizations distribute tools without redesigning work—and why middle managers often absorb the pressure. Listen for: • Shadow AI, “slop grenades,” and the squeeze on middle management • Why documenting a bottleneck is a practical first step • Using AI to develop systems thinking • The shift from salary costs to salaries plus AI spend • Measuring financial returns rather than assuming productivity equals profit • Agent sprawl and the need for governance • Why workforce development belongs in your AI strategy • Scenarios, deliberate practice, and AI-assisted coaching • Matt’s recurring research and meeting-preparation workflows • Privacy, security, and the questions boards should ask • Being more intentional with the time and capacity AI can help create Learn more about Matt’s company, Symplicity: https://www.symplicity.ca/ Watch the full conversation on YouTube: https://youtu.be/NIE1ia505rs Follow AI for the C-Suite wherever you listen to podcasts.

McKinsey's 2026 State of AI survey found that 80% of respondents say AI has improved their personal productivity. Thirty-seven percent of their companies can see it in operating profit. Six percent qualify as what McKinsey calls high performers. Same survey, same companies, same year. That gap is not a data error. It is the central question facing every operator who has been trying to figure out how fast to move. In this episode, Chad breaks down the debate between the acceleration camp and the friction camp using three concepts you can actually apply: the Curve, the Break, and the Snap. The Curve explains why four compounding forces  (capability, price, distribution, and capital) are doing something without historical precedent. The Break explains why organizations, laws, budgets, and human beings are not keeping pace, and why the macro data is not yet screaming industrial revolution. The Snap is the discontinuity that neither camp accounts for... the point at which competitive economics, not average adoption rates, becomes the mechanism that drives diffusion through your industry. For middle market companies, this framework clarifies how to position. You are not waiting for certainty about which camp wins. You are behaving as though friction buys you time while preparing as though that time could disappear quickly. Chad closes with three concrete moves: reframe the question from task-level AI use to workflow-level structural change, pick one complete workflow to rebuild rather than automating individual steps, and start watching your own backfill decisions as a leading indicator of which camp is actually winning inside your building. AI is the defining challenge and opportunity of our generation. AI for the C-Suite™ is a continuous learning and application experience that exists to unite, elevate, and equip leaders to navigate the Exponential Age. Join the AI for the C Suite community today: https://aiforthecsuite.com/ #chadharvey #aiforthecsuite #aic

When should a company use artificial intelligence, and when is traditional automation the better answer? Chad Harvey speaks with Bhaskar Jayakrishnan, Senior Vice President of Engineering for Customer Experience at Cisco, about the practical realities of deploying AI at enterprise scale. Bhaskar explains why organizations should begin with the problem rather than the technology, how token consumption can create enormous operating costs, and why AI and automation should work together instead of competing with one another. They also discuss small language models, semantic routing, production readiness, enterprise data, cybersecurity, AI agents, and why the fundamentals of good software engineering remain essential. Connect with Bhaskar Jayakrishnan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhaskarjayakrishnan Read Bhaskar’s Cisco articles: https://blogs.cisco.com/author/bjayakri Watch the full video: https://youtu.be/a-mXNwTTl5E Learn more about AI for the C Suite: https://aiforthecsuite.com

Click here for the expanded article titled Claude vs ChatGPT Memory Decoded: Neither One Is a Record. It contains additional information and is a companion piece to this episode.  Both Claude and ChatGPT shipped major memory upgrades over the summer of 2026, and neither company explained them particularly well. The result is a wave of reasonable but incorrect assumptions, including the belief that unified memory might finally mean you can stop keeping your own records. It does not. In this episode, Chad unpacks what unified memory actually means across both platforms, the four boundaries where each system stops short, and the critical difference in how they fail. Claude files facts you can read and edit, but loses its work when it opens the wrong drawer. ChatGPT writes an evolving impression of you built from chat history, your email inbox, and connected apps, and retires what used to be true to reflect what is true now. One is a filing cabinet. The other is a colleague's daily-updated impression of you. Neither is a record. Chad maps the four governance edges every mid-market executive should walk through with whoever holds the admin login: project walls and their opposite defaults on each platform, the fact that deleting a chat does not delete what the tool learned, what actually feeds each system's memory, and who can erase months of accumulated context for your entire team with a single click. At a 50-500 person company, you do not have an enterprise governance team to catch these gaps before someone finds that button. The episode closes with four actions, none of which take more than an hour, that establish a clear division between what memory is designed to hold and what belongs in your organization's actual records system. AI for the C-Suite™ is a continuous learning and application experience that exists to unite, elevate, and equip leaders to navigate the Exponential Age. Join the AI for the C Suite community today: https://aiforthecsuite.com/#chadharvey #aiforthecsuite #aic