Three "Golden Rules" for CEOs in the AI Era by Dr. Kai-Fu Lee
The blog post explains three essential AI‑era strategies for CEOs—first digitize the entire business, then use AI to drive core metrics like revenue growth rather than just cut costs, and finally have the CEO personally lead the AI transformation.
In the face of the AI wave, many business owners are plagued by anxiety: Should they go "all-in" immediately, or wait and see? As a pioneer with decades of experience in the field, Dr. Kai-Fu Lee has provided a clear roadmap for CEOs on multiple occasions. In his view, AI is no longer an "elective" for corporate transformation—it is a "core requirement" for survival.
Rather than blindly chasing the sheer scale of Large Language Model (LLM) parameters, CEOs should focus on restructuring their corporate competitiveness from the ground up. Based on Dr. Lee’s core insights, here are three in-depth recommendations:
Rule 1: Don’t Skip Steps—Achieve "Total Digitization" First
Many CEOs see the hype around AI Agents and want their teams to build them immediately. However, they often overlook a brutal reality: if your core business isn't digitized, an AI Agent is just an empty shell that cannot function. Dr. Lee believes that AI is "fed" by high-quality data. If your business still relies on paper documents, fragmented WhatsApp messages, or inconsistent Excel sheets, your AI is like a high-IQ child who has never attended school—it simply cannot touch the core of your operations.
CEOs must be determined to bring all critical business processes online and into systematic frameworks, transforming fragmented info into structured, traceable data assets. This requires long-term patience. Only by creating a sustainable data loop combined with AI Agents can a company build a true competitive moat.
Rule 2: Move Beyond "Cost-Cutting"—Target Core Business Metrics
The first instinct for many companies regarding AI is "降本增效" (reducing costs and increasing efficiency). However, their understanding of "cost-cutting" is often limited to reducing headcount. Dr. Lee views this perspective as extremely narrow. The true North Star of AI transformation should be "efficiency" and "revenue growth" for the core business. If a CEO treats AI merely as a tool to save money, it will remain relegated to marginal automation and fail to deliver a qualitative leap.
CEOs should demand that AI projects link directly to the company’s most critical KPIs, such as revenue growth, conversion rates, customer retention, delivery cycles, or bad debt ratios. AI should not just be an assistant for optimizing processes; it must be the engine driving business growth.
Rule 3: AI Transformation Must Start with the CEO
Dr. Lee has emphasized repeatedly that for a company to fully embrace AI, the CEO must lead the charge. Specifically, the CEO must be the first person in the organization to experience an "AI awakening"—prioritizing, learning, and investing in the technology personally. The more time a CEO invests in AI, the better the chance the company has to stand out.
AI transformation is never a peripheral project that can be outsourced to the CIO or the IT department; it must be a "Top-Down Initiative." Because the introduction of AI inevitably brings about organizational restructuring and the re-engineering of business processes, such deep change can only be pushed forward if the CEO personally sets the strategy and the priorities.
Summary
The AI era does not reward "copy-paste" strategies, nor is there such a thing as "one-click transformation." At this critical junction between the old and the new, the CEO’s role is not that of a cautious follower, but a reconstructor of business logic. Only by laying a solid foundation through digitization, empowering the core business with AI, and personally leading the transformation can a leader secure their company's footing in the AI age.