In the latest instalment of his series examining the impact and challenges of AI within scaling businesses, Ian Horne interviews Board adviser David Brooks who provides valuable insights into leadership and strategy for CEOs navigating the AI landscape.
They delve into the delicate balance between robust business processes and the need to move at pace, concluding with a comprehensive 4-point checklist for CEOs using AI in 2026.
Is the classic defensible moat dead? And will caution be your downfall? Board adviser David Brooks explains what CEOs need to know about leadership and strategy when their businesses are in the AI crosshairs.
A lot can change in a year. Twelve months ago, David Brooks was the CEO of Charterhouse Group, a PE-backed IT services firm, and today, he’s a board adviser to founder-led businesses in the growth, scale-up, and turnaround phases. The past year hasn’t just seen him make a career shift; it’s also included a significant change in how he views the impact of AI.
Brooks tells me that in his CEO days, even towards the end, that AI “wouldn’t have been in the top two or three things we were worried about.” Today, he’s certain it’s a top priority for any technology company. What he had once treated as something to react to, perhaps not immediately, he now considers an existential issue.
This has been a recurring theme in this series of articles. AI has strapped a rocket to software development and go-to-market speeds, making business models more vulnerable than ever to competition, copycats, and in-house builds. Why stick with a technology provider if its product(s) can be easily mimicked for a fraction of the cost?
“People have really woken up to how, for a software business in particular, AI could take away all of your business,” says Brooks. This sentiment has filtered into investment too. “Many people I talk to in PE are saying, ‘I’m not investing in software at the moment’.”
Defending the Indefensible
So are we all screwed? The answer is a little yes and a little no. The ‘yes’, in Brooks’s view, is that classic defensible moats don’t exist in the way they once did. The ‘no’, meanwhile, is that companies can stay ahead of competition by deeply embedding AI, threading it into pricing, lead generation, web design, procurement, and more. It’s more a case of staying ahead than protecting your territory in a landscape where the architecture of business is far less static than it once was. The task might be to design faster wheels rather than deeper and wider moats.
Brooks believes that today’s founders are increasingly cognisant of this. “The founders are building agents at the weekend,” he says, acknowledging that many of today’s innovators have a tech background and a desire to make things happen at speed. He contrasts this with the processes he was familiar with as a CEO in a corporate environment, when each new idea would call for a pilot, guardrails, focus groups, and project initiation documents. In situations where urgency is needed, waiting for processes and permissions could be the very thing that destroys your business.
Does this mean we’ve gone back to ‘move fast and break things’? Not quite. Brooks warns that many founders run the risk of overlooking data integrity, and also raises concerns about founders using AI bots to check in on AI outputs. A CEO could be a mere hallucination away from disaster.
Costs can’t be written off either. It’s very possible that we’ve all been lured in by the current price point for AI tokens, and any company with a token dependency could quickly be on the hook for ever-spiralling costs. Brooks likens it to a cocaine addiction before recalibrating and comparing it to the initial rush to move data to the cloud. “When you got on the cloud, you found out it was just as expensive, just in a different way, and you still had to manage it, just in a different way.”
Leading by Example
Business leaders must rise to the challenges presented by AI. Brooks advises that brutal honesty is the best policy, especially when explaining the vulnerabilities of their product or service. He also believes that CEOs need to take ownership of the AI battle – this is not a task to be delegated. “If you don’t use it yourself, you won’t really understand it well enough,” he adds. In many parts of the tech world, AI fluency has become a cornerstone of effective leadership.
As for the board, Brooks explains that value can be added by sharing stories of effective AI use in other businesses, especially when non-executive directors are able to share examples across several organisations. We are still in an experimental phase of AI, and a broad knowledge of what does and doesn’t work can be of significant benefit.
Echoing the thoughts of Juliette Otterburn Hall from the previous interview in this series, Brooks urges boards not to obsess over just cost-cutting. The greater opportunity, both from an attacking and defensive perspective, is to focus on new modes of operating and the art of the possible. By making layoffs, you may be stifling growth in a way that causes far greater cost in the long run. Outlining an example, Brooks explains that you still need a talented software architect and engineer if you’re to optimise your use of AI.
Putting it all together
Brooks provides a four-point checklist for CEOs using AI in 2026.
- Get hands on
- Don’t delegate AI leadership
- Clearly explain to your team how AI will impact your business model
- Draw up five use cases where you think you can use AI. Then get to work
It’s clear that business leaders need to take action and continue moving forward. What’s less clear, but possibly also true, is that we may need to drop our obsession with moats.
