For much of my career, scaling a company meant being in an office, hiring locally and building management structures to support growth. The playbook was familiar: growth created complexity, and that complexity demanded more people, processes and layers of management.

Today, the playbook is changing.

My teams are distributed across over 80 countries around the world, and we hire the best talent wherever they happen to live. AI is also rapidly changing how information moves through my organization and how decisions are made. The many assumptions leaders have relied on for decades, including myself, no longer hold true.

During my tenure as CEO, the role has fundamentally changed—not because remote work is replacing offices or AI is replacing people, but because the logistics of how we build and run organizations have shifted. As information becomes increasingly commoditized, judgment is becoming the true differentiator in leadership.

You Are Now a Piece of the Decision Tree

Here’s how I think about the CEO role today: As you move up through leadership, you make many of the decisions yourself. As a CEO, you have to delegate. You become one part of a broader decision tree, enabling others to decide rather than making every call yourself. What reaches you are the hardest decisions that rise to the top.

I already work this way. Each month, my leadership team presents KPIs, project updates and function-level priorities. My AI tools capture that information and flag the areas that need closer attention. I then block time to distill each leader’s update into five key takeaways and focus on what matters most to the business.

That’s a very different way of operating from how I worked even just a few years ago. If you’re not doing something similar yet, you’re likely spending hours each week on information that could be concentrated in minutes.

The challenge is that tools like AI can flood you with more information than leaders have ever faced before. The real skill is knowing what not to chase. Not everything that rises to the top is truly urgent. Your job is to tell the difference. More than ever, the CEO role requires sharp judgment about what to act on and the agility to move when it matters. Here are three principles that guide how I made decisions today.

1. AI can give you one answer. Your experience can give you another.

While AI is incredibly useful for gathering and filtering information, experience still matters most. For example, we were recently building a new team with sales, engineering and business development representatives across multiple markets. We asked our AI workforce tool where we should hire. It returned a ranked list of countries based on salary benchmarks, hiring complexity, ramp time and turnover rates. South Africa ranked near the bottom, largely because of the political situation.

But the fundamentals in the country were strong: deep talent availability, strong retention and a favorable employment law environment.

The model didn’t have the local context I did, so I factored that into the decision. Since then, we’ve built a strong presence in South Africa, and it’s going very well.

That’s not an argument against AI. I use these tools every day for market analysis, workforce decisions and competitive intelligence. They are typically faster than any analyst I can hire, but they can only work with what the data shows. As a CEO, you bring context, experience and intuition that they don’t. And if you’ve been in business long enough, that context becomes some of your most valuable intellectual property. Human expertise remains the decisive ingredient in any successful business strategy.

What worries me is the opposite. People lower in the organization may turn to an LLM and outsource their decisions to whatever it says. The problem is that general LLMs are not trained to be accurate; they are trained to be helpful and fluent, which is not the same thing. We run employment law questions through our own purpose-built platform, trained by human HR professionals.  Unlike a general-purpose LLM, it’s designed specifically for employment law and compliance, giving us much greater confidence in the answers it provides.

So teach your organization that AI is a strong partner. It extends your capabilities. But you are still responsible for the decision. If you outsource judgment and it’s wrong, that accountability still sits with you.

2. Stop Thinking Arbitrage. Start Thinking Upgrade.

Beyond technology and AI, I believe the CEO’s role in talent strategy is where the biggest competitive gap will open over the next five years.

Most conversations about global hiring are framed around arbitrage. How do I get the same output for less money? But that framing leads to the wrong outcome. The better question is, how do I upgrade my talent?

When we decided to go fully distributed, hiring the best person for any role, anywhere in the world, we faced an obvious reality. A top-tier engineer in the U.S. earns far more than a top-tier engineer in many other markets. If you exploit that gap, you are doing arbitrage. If you narrow it, you are building something else entirely.

We’ve chosen to set global salary bands by role and performance, not location. If $50,000 is the market norm in your country, but $100,000 is our global base for that role, you can still earn $100,000 working for us. I want the best people. In some high-cost markets, that means we cannot compete on salary. In dozens of others, it makes us the employer of choice for top talent. Those employees bring commitment and loyalty because they work for a multinational, are paid exceptionally well by local standards, and recognize the opportunity.

Looking at the math for a midsize U.S. company paying at the 50th percentile domestically, the same compensation budget, deployed globally with intention, can land at the 99th percentile in many other markets. You can end up cutting costs and dramatically upgrading quality at the same time.

The talent war over the next decade will be won by thinking talent-first rather than location-first.

3. Judgment Is the New Competitive Advantage.

AI means access to information is no longer the differentiator. The hardest questions I face today are not technical, but human. Which skills should we invest in? Which roles should evolve? How do we build a culture that embraces change without creating fear? How do we scale while keeping people engaged and motivated?

Those are not questions AI can answer for you. Those of us who have been in business a long time built our judgment the hard way—through failure, stress and being thrown into situations we were not ready for. That’s how I learned. It’s how most of us learned.

That’s why we intentionally give people stretch opportunities. We give them responsibility before they feel fully ready. We support them, but we also expect them to make decisions, learn from mistakes and grow.

Very soon, everyone will have access to AI tools. The leaders who stand out will be the ones who know when to trust the data and when to challenge it.

That is ultimately what has changed about the CEO role. Technology can help process information, identify patterns and surface opportunities—but leadership is still about judgment. In an age of abundant information, good judgment may become the most valuable skill in business.

The CEO’s job has never been easy, but I think it is about to become far more interesting. And if you find that intellectually stimulating, this is a great time to run a company.