VIDEO: KEYS TO SUCCESS
gration, upgrades, governance, and scarce engineering talent. He prefers exploiting the massive investments of enterprise platforms already sitting at the center of business workflows. Calix, for example, is a heavy Salesforce and Microsoft user internally. Rather than recreating major enterprise AI capa- bilities independently, Weening wants his people asking vendors a different question: What AI workflows are you building, and how quickly can we put them to work? For Weening, AI itself will increas- ingly become commoditized. The real value resides in secure workflows, proprietary knowledge, trusted data, and implementation. That distinction is critical. The next competitive advan- tage won’t come from having access to an AI model. Everybody will have that. It will come from understanding how work actually gets done.
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THE NEW
LEADERSHIP SKILL This thinking led Weening to what may be his most important manage- ment prediction: Tomorrow’s leaders must learn to map work. To do that, corporate leaders should ask these questions. • What does your team actually do?
• Where does information enter? • Where does it stall? • Where are people repeating low-value tasks? • Where does judgment matter? • Where can an agent act? • Where must a human remain? Weening rejects the fantasy that technology can rescue a broken process. Only after answering those questions should management in- sert AI. “A crappy salesperson who didn’t use Salesforce 10 years ago,”
Weening’s Five Rules for AI Leaders
AI is powerful. It is not fairy dust. 1. Buy before you build. Don’t assume an internal proto- type should become enterprise software. Use the invest- ments, security, scale, and workflow knowledge of estab- lished platforms where appropriate.
2. Follow the workflow. The value is increasingly not the AI model itself. The value is connecting intelligence to real work.
3. Fix the process first. AI cannot rescue a process people don’t follow.
4. Train the humans. Calix says it began a broad AI-literacy effort before its agentic rollout – offering education, forums, webinars, and training. Weening said roughly 92% of employees had participated in some form of AI learning during the initiative.
5. Augment complex selling. For long-cycle, high-value sales, use AI to reduce administration, improve insight, and make sellers more effective – not to remove the hu- man relationship.
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