Copilots made your people faster. They did not make your company smarter.
That gap is now the thing keeping chief executives awake. In KPMG's 2025 Global CEO
Outlook — 1,350 chief executives of companies above US$500 million in revenue —
84% expect at least one AI-native company to displace an established leader in their
industry within three years, and 71% put AI among their top investment priorities,
with most committing 10–20% of budget to it. Nearly everyone is spending. Far fewer are
changing how the business actually runs.
Personal AI was the easy first step, and it was worth taking — but it has a ceiling.
A copilot improves the person using it and nothing else: the process around them still
moves at the speed of handovers, each tool hoards its own fragment of context, and every
new assistant adds another set of permissions for someone to audit. Scale that to a
hundred tools and you have a hundred small improvements and one large governance
problem — not an organisation that runs on AI. The step change comes from connecting the
work, not multiplying the tools: one runtime, one shared context, one governance fabric.
That is the line between having AI in the organisation and being an organisation that
runs on AI.
Figures from the KPMG 2025 Global CEO Outlook, surveyed 5 August – 10 September 2025.