Black Lake founder Yuxiang Zhou pitted an AI agent against his top sales coach. His most experienced salespeople chose the AI

But he’s still waiting for the “Google moment” in AI When Yuxiang Zhou, founder of Black Lake Technologies, pitted an AI sales coach against his company’s most experienced sales leader, seven out of 10 of Black Lake’s most senior salespeople voted for the machine’s advice.

The experiment began when Zhou complained that his CRM software reduced a day of client conversations to “a very subjective one paragraph, and then the leader sits back and reads this paragraph and analyzes.” So his company, a Shanghai-based startup that supplies AI agents to factories across Asia, gave its salespeople a pin that recorded their conversations and location.

These conversations were fed into an AI agent trained to act like a coach.

“A lot of people use AI as a way to co-pilot the leadership, but I’m trying to explore the way of me co-piloting the AI,” Zhou said at the Fortune Leaders Forum in Macau on Sept.

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“A lot of my decisions are now made by agents, large language models, and my executives.” Still, human salespeople have their place.

Agents are “emotionless,” Zhou noted, and sales teams still need to be motivated—something only a person can do.

Zhou was one of three panelists at the Forum discussing how a corporate executive’s role needs to change if AI can handle reasoning and execution.

For Becca Carroll, chief strategy officer at design agency IDEO , speed isn’t enough to build a moat against competition.

Being the first to market, or even the first to follow some new innovation, won’t be enough to create a “durable” advantage.

“Once you dream of something, your competitors could roll it out to market the next day , or two weeks later,” she said.

Carroll also updated IDEO’s famous concept of the “T-shaped person”—deep expertise in one discipline, popularized by former CEO Tim Brown —with a new archetype: the “comb-shaped” person, someone who is “almost polymathic, someone who has depth of expertise across a series of disciplines and can fluidly move between them.” James Arnett, Wipro’s managing director for Southeast Asia, Greater China, and South Korea, put the same shift in leadership terms: “The big shift is…from directing to orchestrating.” Wipro, he said, has moved “way past” the question of how AI can save clients money, and is now asking how to redesign what it offers from scratch.

All panelists agreed that the constraint isn’t technology, but people, whether that’s employees, customers, or even executives themselves.

“A lot of the time, we can see that AI can do something—but is the organization ready for it?” Arnett said.