A line from a recent Eric Vishria podcast has been stuck in my head:
“Every day you are making plan (as a SaaS CEO), you are destroying equity value.”
I took his point to be that CEOs should not confuse faithfully executing yesterday’s plan with building terminal value.
Growing up I was fascinated by stories of the great turnaround operators. Characters like Lou Gerstner, Alan Mulally, and Andy Grove seemed larger than life with unparalleled courage. They took institutions built around yesterday’s success, formed a conviction about the future, and changed their companies before it was too late. I thought that was a specialist’s job reserved for businesses already in trouble. However, running Beacon in the age of AI has changed my mind.
Some context on my privileged perch. Beacon owns 40+ technology businesses serving over 22K enterprise customers and 5MM enterprise users across the real economy, which means I spend much of my time talking to real economy CEOs and CIOs about what they want from technology and how they are preparing for AI. That gives us an unusual view of how AI is actually arriving inside the daily workflows of construction companies, energy businesses, schools, sports organizations, and hundreds of other ‘real’ industries.
Across those conversations, and in running Beacon, I am realizing that in the age of AI, every incumbent CEO is a perpetual turnaround leader. A turnaround is no longer an isolated episode, it is the job. What makes AI different from previous technology shifts is that there will be no steady state on the other side. The models will keep improving, the cost of intelligence will keep falling, and the products and organizations we build around them will keep becoming obsolete. Hence, the “turnaround” needs to be how we operate instead of an episode that ends.
The strange part is that profits keep going up and the stock market is ripping. Yet most operators I talk to sense something is off. It feels like the calm before the storm. Effectuating change when things are “going well” is brutally hard because the payoffs seem speculatively far off.
At Instacart, my dream was to get to default alive, then big enough that no one would get fired for buying us (the way no one gets fired for buying IBM), and to then move to enjoying easier days. When we were profitable, growing and the belle of the ball, I let loss aversion talk me out of things I wish I had done. I no longer believe those easier days are coming.
I believe the terminal value of most enterprises that do not continuously retool as AI native will trend towards zero. It is just a matter of how long it will take to get there. The great newspaper franchises did not collapse because they suddenly forgot how to operate newspapers. Many remained profitable while their terminal value evaporated. They kept optimizing the business that existed while the world moved somewhere else. AI will do the same to companies whose products, cost structures and organizations remain designed for a pre AI world.
If you accept my premise, the turnaround CEO’s playbook now should be applied with extreme urgency to businesses that look healthy and will increasingly become the new normal of how we all operate:
- Plans are lagging indicators: Your annual plan tells you how the current business is performing, not whether it deserves to exist. Imagine a competitor that would build your product with one-tenth the people at one-tenth the price, and work backwards.
- Stay personally close to customers: Sense changes in their tone regarding expectations and their posture about your product/service. Unfortunately, teams hear what they want to hear and news gets filtered with a positive bias as it makes its way up the management chain.
- Dream big: Go back to first principles. Ask what your biggest opportunities are, then bring in collaborators to imagine how AI might unlock them. We recently worked with a large industrial goods hauler who is a multi-decade customer of one of our businesses to help them redesign their customer intake and pricing function, transforming it to be AI vs. human led.
- Invest against terminal value: This may mean deliberately reducing margins or breaking traditional compensation bands to recruit exceptional AI native talent. The scarcest resource in business today is people who understand both what AI can do and how to redesign an organization around it.
- Shorten the time from information to action: Reduce organizational layers, cut decision time dramatically, and abandon consensus as the default. The process of seeking consensus often dulls actions so much that you will risk thinking you are making progress against a transformation agenda when actually you are just reshuffling deck chairs.
- Be transparent about the existential imperative: Treat your team like adult professionals. Explain clearly what you believe is changing, why it matters, and what it requires from them. People can handle urgency and this is the greatest opportunity for learning any of us have had in our professional life. Your team cannot operate in the new normal if your turnaround is disguised as side ‘initiative’.
We had numerous turnaround moments at Instacart, usually imposed on us by a business model that was never supposed to work (until it did!). But they came in episodes. Now even healthy companies face a permanent requirement to reinvent themselves.
The great turnaround CEOs shared courage, conviction and clarity about the future. Anyone managing an enterprise in 2026 needs to find and keep those qualities. Start by assuming the terminal value of your business, as currently constructed, is zero. Then get to work earning it back, again and again.