The CEO job description has remained remarkably stable for decades—but the times they are a’changin’.

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That stability persisted through wave after wave of technological change. The internet, mobile, cloud computing—each transformed business operations, but none fundamentally altered the CEO’s core responsibilities. Strategy, culture, resource allocation, organizational design—the essential functions remained constant even as the tools improved.

AI is different. It isn’t just a tool that executes; it is also a system that makes choices. It makes judgments about customers, employees, and strategy. And this means that when you deploy AI, you’re not just installing software. You are importing a decision-maker with its own values into your organization.

That changes what it means to be the CEO—the person who is ultimately responsible for how the organization thinks and acts. Four competencies will be central to CEOs who want to thrive in this new reality.

Effective CEOs do not simply delegate AI to the CTO and then just forget about it. They actively orchestrate their organization’s innovation portfolio—a curated collection of initiatives that balances transformational ambition with incremental wins.

This means excelling in three areas.

Vision setting: articulating how AI aligns with organizational purpose. When employees understand why AI matters beyond cost savings, adoption accelerates and resistance diminishes.

Boundary setting: defining where AI should and shouldn’t operate. Which decisions require human judgment? Which processes can be automated? If a CEO wants to remain in control of the organization’s actions and culture, they must draw these lines deliberately rather than allowing them to emerge by default, depending on what kind of product the AI labs ship.

Cultural transformation: personally modeling the mindset shift AI requires. When the CEO publicly shares their own AI learning journey—including their mistakes—it fosters an organizational culture that legitimates the kind of experimentation needed to adopt and adapt this new technology to the company’s needs.

Organizations stumble when they become intoxicated by grand visions while neglecting smaller victories—and they also fail when they ignore the big picture and get lost in the weeds. The key, as always, is balance. CEOs must operate on both macro and micro levels simultaneously. They need to be just as comfortable asking how AI might reshape their entire industry as they are asking how AI helps a product team ship improvements next month.