Most organizations in regulated industries aren't slow on AI because of compliance. They're slow because no one has decided to be brave enough to move.

In this episode, Chad sits down with Ondar Tarlow — a marketing executive who led AI adoption inside financial services organizations before most CMOs were willing to have the conversation. Ondar's team deployed propensity modeling and machine learning to identify the next best product for existing customers, drove a 5x improvement in campaign performance, and cut production time by 75% using generative AI tools layered into their creative workflow.

The conversation goes well beyond marketing tactics. Ondar makes the case that AI should never be compartmentalized inside IT — or any single department — and walks through a practical framework for how middle market leaders can get started: map the workflow first, identify high-leverage use cases, and treat AI as an assistant that helps your team do more in less time, not a replacement for the people already doing the work.

You'll also hear Ondar and Chad dig into what it actually looks like to navigate the tension between moving fast and managing compliance risk in a regulated environment — and why the leaders who manage that tension best are the ones willing to align marketing, legal, and risk teams around a shared strategy before they start testing.

Ondar Tarlow is a CMO and consultant with more than 20 years of experience in financial services, motorsports, and lifestyle brands. His hands-on experience with AI adoption in highly regulated environments makes his perspective directly applicable for middle market leaders who are ready to move past the conversation and into action.

Walk away from this episode with a clearer starting point for mapping AI into your existing workflows — and a sharper sense of what's actually holding your organization back.

Watch the full episode: youtu.be/VOyAn_BX3Qw

Speed is the operating obsession right now, and for good reason. Across industries and company sizes, the leaders moving fastest with AI are opening a real gap on everyone else. If your competitor is qualifying a customer inquiry in four minutes and you're still taking two days, that is a structural disadvantage. Speed compounds, and right now, pressing it is the right move.

But speed is on a curve. It starts as an edge, becomes a race, and eventually becomes table stakes. Electricity went through this curve. Cloud computing went through it. AI-powered speed is early on that same arc, which means the leaders who are only building for speed are building for a moment, not a position.

In this episode, Chad introduces the concept of strategic slowness: the capacity to hold position under pressure, defer irreversible decisions, and deploy judgment when the whole market is screaming at you to act. It is not a philosophy of moving slowly. Think of it as a reserve, held in tension with speed, the way a disciplined investor holds cash.

Chad walks through three practical moves for building this capacity into your organization: a decision cadence that separates reversible from irreversible calls, calendar discipline that protects thinking time as a capital expenditure, and a tenure audit that identifies the pattern memory people your organization is likely undervaluing right now. That last one carries a reframe worth sitting with: in a world where institutional facts are queryable but institutional judgment is not, your long-tenured people are carrying an asset that didn't exist five years ago.

This episode gives you a framework for thinking past the current era of speed, and a concrete starting point for building the reserve that will matter when speed alone stops winning.

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. 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/

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AI isn’t the question anymore. Execution is.

In this episode of AI for the C Suite, Chad Harvey sits down with Chris Happ, CEO of Virtuous AI, to break down why most companies are stuck between knowing AI matters and actually making it work.

98% of CEOs say AI matters.

So what’s going wrong?

This conversation goes beyond tools and hype. It focuses on what’s actually happening inside organizations and why so many AI efforts stall before they ever scale.

We cover:

If you’re a CEO or business leader trying to figure out how to move from experimentation to real impact with AI, this is a practical place to start.

Watch the full episode: https://youtu.be/sUcoylSLSzE

In this episode, I sat down with Arya Bolurfrushan, founder and CEO of Applied AI, to talk about what most companies are getting wrong about AI.

Instead of asking where AI fits into existing workflows, Arya flips the question entirely — where do humans belong in an AI-driven system?

We get into:

This is a practical and honest look at what it actually takes to implement AI inside real organizations.

Full episode: https://youtu.be/BYjN58XyJKQ

The pressure on mid-market CTOs is about to ratchet up... and most are still running a playbook that can't keep pace. Your owners are reading the same headlines you are. Their peers are talking about five-person shops punching above their weight class. And the first place they're going to look with questions is you.

In this episode, Chad breaks down a conversation from a recent CTO roundtable with mid-market tech leaders running teams at companies between 100 and 700 employees across construction, manufacturing, distribution, education, and property management and distills it into three moves you should be executing between now and Q3. First, solve for speed, because the window where fast AI deployment is a differentiator is closing. Second, hire process mappers (not AI engineers) because your teams can't see the friction in their own workflows, and that's where the real ROI lives. Third, stop being a gatekeeper and become a platform enabler, because the people inside your four walls are already building things and your job is to channel that energy, not crush it.

If your AI strategy still runs on a six-to-nine-month evaluation cycle and everything flows through IT for approval, this episode gives you a concrete framework to compress that timeline, identify your highest-leverage hire, and reposition your team as the accelerator — not the bottleneck.

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. 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

In this episode of AI for the C-Suite, Chad Harvey talks with Dr. Sam Zolfagharian, president and co-founder of Yegatech, about how leaders should actually approach AI inside their organizations.

Dr. Sam has worked with AI since 2015, long before the recent surge in attention around it. In this conversation, she shares why many companies get stuck experimenting with AI tools, what it takes to move toward real strategy, and why culture and employee buy-in matter more than most leaders think.

She also shares the one question every CEO should ask when thinking about AI adoption.

Learn more about Yegatech https://yegatech.com

For 90 years, the boundary of your firm has been set by coordination costs. Agentic AI is rewriting that equation - not incrementally, but structurally - and the implications land hardest on organizations sitting in the broad middle of the firm-size distribution.

Chad walks through a recent research paper called The Headless Firm and translates its core argument into operator language. When AI agents coordinate through standardized protocols, the cost of adding a new capability becomes roughly constant rather than compounding. That shift produces what the researchers call an hourglass architecture: deep domain expertise at the edges, a thin coordination layer in the middle, and a squeeze on firms that aren't clearly positioned at either pole. For knowledge-intensive sectors, the math favors hyper-specialized, high-leverage teams over broad internal capability - the "scalable boutique" model where small firms generate outsized revenue per employee.

Three concrete moves to test this in your organization: run a coordination cost audit on your top workflows, identify whether your durable advantage lives at the top of the hourglass (customer intent) or the bottom (domain expertise), and pilot a vertical agent replacement within 90 days to see whether integration costs stay constant or balloon. That pilot is your empirical proof point before committing to a broader shift.

AI For the C Suite with Chad Harvey™ 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.

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Episode based upon Klein & Wieczorek, "The Headless Firm: How AI Reshapes Enterprise Boundaries," arXiv:2602.21401v1, February 24, 2026. Cross-references Professor Anton Korinek's research on knowledge work cost de-escalation.

See also https://chadharvey.com/inspiration/friday-february-27-2026/

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Join the AI for the C Suite community today: https://aiforthecsuite.com/

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AI is changing the nature of work faster than most leaders realize. In this episode of AI for the C Suite, Chad Harvey sits down with Brent Orrell, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, to explore what AI is actually doing to organizations right now.

Brent explains why we are moving from an economy of doing to one of judging, why curiosity may be the most important skill of the future, and why imposter syndrome might actually be a sign that you are growing.

They also discuss:

• Why AI is not optional for leaders

Watch the full podcast here: https://youtu.be/KbeJ8--09ic

Subscribe for more conversations on how AI is reshaping leadership, strategy, and the future of work.

AI is expanding your team's cognitive reach but it may also be quietly eroding their cognitive depth. A landmark study from the Quarterly Journal of Economics reveals that the capacity to sustain deep, effortful thinking is trainable, transferable across domains, and can't be replaced by incentives. The implications for AI-enabled organizations are significant.

Chad unpacks the research and connects it directly to the middle market leadership challenge: when AI handles the routine cognitive work, what's left are the judgment calls, the ambiguity, and the strategic integration that demand sustained focus - not faster reactions. He introduces a simple framework (reach versus depth) and lays out three concrete moves you can implement this week: designing AI deployments that protect sustained thinking, building cognitive endurance into leadership development, and auditing your AI stack through an endurance lens.

If your organization is getting faster but you're not sure it's getting sharper, this episode gives you the research and the playbook to close that gap.

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. 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