Every day another industry leader proclaims that everything will change with AI. While there is no question AI is the most transformative tech shift since the industrial revolution, all the hype means leaders lack real answers about how those changes will roll out or improve critical decisions that will impact the future of their business.
As the CEO of a technology company that has invested over $2 billion in evolving our cloud and managed services platform over the past 14 years, I have seen firsthand how foundational innovation sets the stage for transformational leaps. Two years ago, we recognized that AI had matured from future potential to strategic imperative—prompting a $100M investment while continuing to evolve our existing platform. Soon we will launch the next generation of our platform with AI fully integrated, putting our customers in a winning position while giving our internal teams the early-adopter advantage to evaluate vendor solutions and empower employees to harness AI’s full potential.
Our team sees AI following the 80/20 rule: 80% of jobs will change 20%, and 20% of jobs will change 80%. Here are four questions we continue to ask as we progress on our AI journey, for our customers and internally:
1. How are we encouraging AI literacy across the entire organization?
AI is moving too fast to guarantee ROI; but it is too transformative to gatekeep it from employees. You will never find out how AI can help your teams unless you enable innovation that comes from all levels in the organization. The best way to encourage that is by giving tools to everyone.
In our case we added Microsoft CoPilot to our existing contract as soon as it was released to encourage team members to use AI in their daily work while running AI literacy and education programs across the company.
2. What is the AI innovation process?
As a leader, you want to operationalize curiosity and let every employee explore, test, and learn what is possible with AI. The promise of AI is that a non-coder can build an app, and it is true. Your most innovative team members will build their apps for their business problem and go fast—and if you offer a little help, these innovators will go faster.
In the last six months we have seen 725 exploratory agents created by employees experimenting with CoPilot. Of those, 40 agents have been selected to scale and are being used routinely across teams. Meanwhile, IT continues to offer technical and moral support to the self-starters.
The most important part of this process is understanding these employee-led innovations and applying them to the broader organization. In our case, promising ideas are funneled through a formal review process to assess their potential for enterprise-wide scalability—for instance, a services-built app was expanded with enterprise support to also support sales. When a use case requires IT or development resources, the innovator helps define the use case and provide an ROI, after which the AI steering committee prioritizes initiatives based on their potential impact. This ensures the most valuable ideas move forward efficiently while the entire organization learns.
3. What is the A2A and MCP story?
As a CEO you need to learn the key terms A2A and MCP and push for these standards to avoid your teams building silos of technology that become obsolete as they cannot work with other systems—the bane of every enterprise back office.
A2A is agent to agent; think of it as APIs for agentic. One vendor’s agent speaks to another vendor’s agent, which allows the passing of context so that an enterprise workflow can succeed. Vendors will resist this as they try to monopolize your spend.
MCP is model context protocol. MCP is a server that sits in front of a data repository and summarizes the context for agents. This reduces the need for agents to access your data—which in many cases they do not need; they only need the context of a situation to decide what action to take. This will keep your teams from getting caught in a quagmire of creating data silos while reducing your need for data warehouses.
4. When will we see the ROI?
In the rigid world of IT timelines and budgets, we would all like to see ROI immediately. But remember the greatest innovations and paybacks often come from learning and failure. After all, when asked about all the missteps on his way to create the electric light, Edison famously answered: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Artificial intelligence is going to change the world and everything that we do. Failure to invest in AI will put your entire business at risk, and a short-term focus on ROI is myopic.
Our culture is about “better, better, never best,” where we celebrate success and learn from failure. This approach has enabled our product teams to evolve our platform at the right time for artificial intelligence, and for our IT organization to draft on those learnings while creating an environment where employees can innovate and keep Calix and our customers as leaders of the AI opportunity.