Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition:

• Highlights from the Fortune AIQ Summit.
• Trump names Clayton AI czar and appoints ‘Superintelligence Task Force.’
• OpenAI, Anthropic and their insurers face mounting legal claims over ‘rogue AI’ agents.
• A Tencent AI agent swarm?
• A better business simulator for AI agents.
• How much tolerance for AI causing “bad things” should we tolerate?

I spent last week in New York, where I was helping to host and moderate Fortune’s inaugural AIQ Summit, held at the New York Stock Exchange. The event was focused on how Fortune 500 companies are implementing AI successfully at scale and there was a lot of insightful conversation, both on stage and off. Today, I’ll talk about a few of the highlights. (You can check out more of our coverage of the Fortune AIQ Summit, check out the AIQ 75 list, and read some case studies from the companies on that list here. You can also see my on-stage session on “Building the Company of the Future” on this week’s Fortune AI Weekly vodcast. You can view the vodcast here.)

One of the themes that came across strongly was the extent to which people are the X-factor in determining AI success. The methodology behind Fortune’s AIQ List is based, in part, on the five pillars of ServiceNow’s Enterprise AI Maturity Index, and ServiceNow’s Diana David (who has the amazing title “forward-deployed futurist), told me that the most striking gap between the companies that are AI “Pacesetters”—scoring in the top fifth of all companies on the Maturity Index—and everyone else, is that 57% of those Pacesetter companies are investing in upskilling their employees on AI, compared to just 4% for those not in that top bracket.

The gap between these Pacesetters and the rest of the pack is big across other people-oriented dimensions too: 68% of Pacesetters have plans to attract, hire, and retain AI talent; just 10% of the rest do. The Pacesetters also stand out for having developed a long-term HR strategy specifically to support their AI strategy and for having conducted a comprehensive assessment of AI skills across their organizations.

This focus on people was echoed throughout the day. Futurist Amy Webb (yes, futurists are a bit like London buses—I go months without encountering one and then I get to interview two in a single afternoon!) said that one reason so many large companies complain that they aren’t seeing enterprise-wise AI value is because they are not investing in training people in how to use the technology well. She said there’s a lot of “learned helplessness” in large organizations when it comes to technology. (She compared this to taxi drivers who have become completely reliant on GPS, and in many cases, can’t even type the address into the phone themselves.)

Drew Holler, the chief human resources officer at homebuilder Lennar, agreed, but told Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell that employees have to take some responsibility too. “We’re going to give you all the tools, but it’s your responsibility to upskill yourself as well,” he said. “We’re going to give you trainings, but you, as an individual, have to upskill.”

Adaptability may matter more than expertise
Many of the speakers said that the most important human—and organizational—skills for the AI era are flexibility and adaptability. “It’s not about being AI native,” Webb said. “It’s about being flexible, and it is entirely possible for any company to be more flexible, but they have to put together the mechanisms to effectuate that.” Danielle Gonzalez, the chief people officer at cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, also emphasized the need to be adaptable. “We’re looking for agency, and we’re looking for those people who can not only learn something at a fast rate…but also unlearn what they thought to be true, so that they can make space to move forward,” she said. She said Palo Alto Networks now uses “observable interviews” and hackathons to assess job candidates, using these to see firsthand how a person solves problems, rather than doing more static interviews where a candidate simply tells stories about their accomplishments.

Interestingly, given all the news of “rogue AI” incidents lately, executives at the AIQ Summit were much more focused on how to deploy AI successfully than they were on governance concerns. If anything, there was a view that an over-emphasis on risks, especially from chief information security officers and corporate general counsel, was often what prevented large companies from implementing AI in ways that generated big returns. “There’s a pretty big disconnect between the CEO, oftentimes, and their board of directors, and the CISO or the chief risk officer and their desires to make sure that things are safe and stable,” Webb said. She said that chief risk officers and CISOs deserve “a seat at the table” when it comes to formulating AI strategy but that they need to learn to “stop saying ‘no’ before they say ‘tell me more.’” She said these executives needed the right incentives to ensure they are not blockers to AI implementation.

Forget the SaaSpocalypse
Another observation that came out of my discussions at both AIQ and elsewhere recently: the SaaSpocalypse fears of earlier this year were clearly overblown.

Michelle Kwon, the chief operating officer at AI startup Runway, told me on stage at AIQ that while the company is as AI-native as it gets and uses AI to do a lot of work within the company, especially when it comes to coding, it still buys plenty of off-the-shelf software from traditional SaaS vendors. “We are not going to build our own payment system. That probably is not the best use of our time. There are some fantastic payment processors and fintech companies we work with on that side,” she said. “I am also not thinking about building out our own HR compliance system. That also doesn’t seem the best use of our time and investment.”

Instead, she said Runway is focused on building software with AI that has clear topline impact: it recently debuted an AI agent that can plan, execute, and measure an online video advertising campaign.

Meanwhile, another frontier AI company I spoke to a few weeks ago mentioned that they had just implemented Workday. If that company isn’t looking to replace its HR software with something it coded in-house, believe me, no Fortune 500 company is looking to do that either. So it’s not exactly end times for the big SaaS vendors.

With that, here’s more AI news.

Jeremy Kahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
@jeremyakahn

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