Jack Schlossberg is not the most obvious person to be arguing that American CEOs need to fundamentally change how they lead. At 33, he's JFK’s grandson, a congressional candidate in New York, and he’s more likely to be giving speeches about democracy than dissecting corporate leadership. But his recent essay in Fortune makes a case that management consultants make only in hushed tones: The CEO profile itself needs to change — and AI is a big reason why.
What makes his argument compelling is not that he says AI, social media, and culture matter. Plenty of people say that. It’s that he argues the CEO profile itself needs to change. Too many executives still treat cultural and social media forces as side issues — things to be managed after the real decisions are made. Schlossberg says they’re now part of the operating environment itself, already being magnified and sometimes distorted by AI.
AI is the force multiplier
Yes, the challenge is a three-way convergence of AI, social media, and an ever-changing culture. But AI is the force multiplying the other two. It speeds up confusion, blurs what’s real, raises the stakes of mistakes, and creates a new layer of exposure — even for companies that don’t think of themselves as AI companies.
A deepfake can become a marketing problem, a P.R. problem, and a legal problem almost at once. An automated mistake can spread faster than a company can explain it. A leadership team can find itself reacting to synthetic noise, real distrust, and public blowback all at the same time. That’s not a communications problem with a tech wrinkle — it’s a leadership problem.
And if that sounds overstated, the outside research points in the same direction.
Awareness is not readiness
PwC’s 29th Global CEO Survey from earlier this month is one of many signs that Schlossberg is onto something. The survey says that AI sits at the center of CEO agendas, yet adoption remains uneven: Fewer than a quarter of CEOs say AI is applied extensively across major business areas, and most report limited financial returns so far. That’s a useful distinction. It tells us that many CEOs understand that AI matters, but it does not tell us they are ready. In fact, it suggests the opposite: Awareness is spreading faster than execution.
Deloitte, in The State of AI in the Enterprise, describes many organizations as standing at “the untapped edge” of AI’s potential and declares that success now depends on moving from ambition to activation. That phrase gets at the gap more cleanly than a lot of corporate jargon does. Plenty of leaders are talking about — and experimenting with — AI. The harder question is who is actually reorganizing, governing, and leading for an AI-shaped business environment.
That’s why Schlossberg’s argument is worth dwelling on.
For years, the standard image of the CEO was a person defined by operational command, financial fluency, and organizational discipline. Those qualities still matter, but they’re no longer sufficient on their own. The strongest CEOs in the years ahead will need a wider field of vision — one that takes in not only operations and markets, but also AI’s opportunities and risks, cultural shifts and reputational risk, public trust and narrative, and the speed at which separate problems now collide.
The rise of the Renaissance Professional
This is where I think the conversation gets especially interesting. The leaders who fit this moment are not just classic operators with a slightly better grasp of technology. They will be something closer to what I think of as the Renaissance Professional: someone who knows their industry deeply, has real fluency in technology – including AI – and can communicate easily across technical teams, business teams, financial markets, the media, and the broader public.
That’s not an argument for performative leadership or hot-take management — it’s an argument for a different kind of fluency. Business needs less wannabe social influencers, not more. But it does need leaders who understand that AI is no longer just a tool story. It’s a governance story, a workforce story, a reputational story, and increasingly, a judgment story. Once that is understood, the old idea that AI can be left mostly to the tech team looks badly out of date.
That kind of fluency is going to matter more than many boardrooms currently seem to understand. The new CEOs do not need to write code, but they do need a much stronger grasp of technology than the old model ever required. AI is reshaping labor, trust, communications, competition, and risk all at once. Leaders who cannot move comfortably among those worlds — and communicate credibly across them — are going to look increasingly out of step.
They are also going to need something else that many companies praise but still struggle to practice: being agile. Not the jargon-heavy version borrowed from software development, but the real thing — the ability to learn quickly, adapt quickly, and respond intelligently when the ground shifts. In an AI-driven business environment, that kind of agility can no longer be simply a management buzzword. It needs to be a leadership requirement.
That, to me, is the real takeaway from Schlossberg’s piece.
His argument is important not because he’s Jack Schlossberg. It’s important because he’s saying something more leaders ought to be saying: Many CEOs are still leading for a world that has already changed. The business environment is going to continue to get faster, more volatile, more reactive, and less forgiving than the one many executives were trained for. AI is a big reason why.
The next generation of CEOs will not be defined simply by who can run operations well. They will be defined by who can lead in an AI-driven environment where trust is more fragile, reaction times are shorter, and mistakes can scale fast. And increasingly, they will look more like the Renaissance Professional: someone for whom business fluency is the baseline, not the endpoint, and who can lead across technology, culture, and trust in a world where too many executives still treat those forces as side issues.
