FOUR OF OUR BEST NEW IDEAS FOR THE C-SUITE

Technology is trending like never before, with gen AI cresting the wave. Decades of experience working with executives have taught us something vital: it’s never just about the tech. Companies need to pull other levers to get the most from their digital investments, like leadership, change management, talent, and innovation. In this edition of the CEO Shortlist, we explore how organizations are already deploying realistic AI simulations to achieve operational excellence, getting value from the cloud, and more. We hope you enjoy the read.

—Liz and Homayoun

What’s new

Get real. Simulated realism, à la The Matrix, is here. Companies can—and do—create extremely accurate digital simulations of components, products, and processes that replicate the behavior of their real-world counterparts. But don’t take our word for it: read exactly how Formula One World Championship racing, John Deere, Tata Steel, and other organizations have taken their products to the next level with AI. 

Get plugged in with “The AI revolution will be ‘virtualized,’” a new article by Kimberly Borden, Mark Huntington, Mithun Kamat, and Will Roper.

What’s now

Come for the machine learning insights, stay for the stories. Today, Pali Bhat is Reddit’s chief product officer. But he didn’t even see his first computer until he was in college. From there, he went on to use machine learning to improve payments on Google Chrome, develop high-quality Reddit data sets to train large language models, and embrace his mistakes. 

Gather ’round for story time with “Pali Bhat on building intelligent products,” a McKinsey on Building Products podcast conversation with Chandra Gnanasambandam and Rikki Singh.

What’s next

Up in the air. Ninety-five percent of European companies in our recent survey say they’re capturing value from cloud computing. Two-thirds have at least 20 percent of their workload on the cloud. So what’s the problem? For all their success, these companies know they’re only scratching the surface. Plenty of North American and Asian peers are in the same predicament. Our latest research has answers on what comes next. 

Check your download speed with “The state of cloud computing in Europe: Increasing adoption, low returns, huge potential,” by Bernardo Betley, Hana Dib, Bjørnar Jensen, and Bernhard Mühlreiter.

What’s needed

Empathy and humanity. Those are the main themes we’re hearing as we talk to CEOs around the world about how they’re leading hundreds of thousands of colleagues through a seemingly endless series of global crises. In this update to our guidelines on what matters most for CEOs in 2024, we look at how things are going this year for those in the corner office. 

Catch up on “CEO priorities: Where to focus as the year unfolds.”

We hope you find these ideas inspiring and helpful. See you next time with four more McKinsey ideas for the CEO and others in the C-suite.

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