Great leaders in the age of AI are customer obsessed. They lead from the mindset of hyper-focusing on prioritizing customer needs above all else. When leaders develop any type of plan, from strategic to product plans, they don’t start by thinking about company objectives and capabilities. Instead, they only consider how to meet customer needs 10 times better, faster, and cost-effectively. Once they have hit upon the vision of the solution, they plan and work backward to make it a reality. Everything starts with the customer in mind: What customer problem am I trying to solve? What is the proposed solution? What does success look like for the solution?

Amazon illustrates what it means to lead with an almost religious fervor for customers. The company strives to be Earth’s most customer-centric organization. Their focus is improving customers’ lives by making shopping at Amazon better, cheaper, and faster. Amazon’s leadership principles keep the customer at the center of decisions and actions. Under the customer-obsessed leadership of Jeff Bezos, Amazon transformed from an online bookstore into a trillion-dollar company in just over two decades. Most people would agree that Amazon wouldn’t have grown to such a scale without customer obsession embedded in everything the company thinks, says, and does—or doesn’t do.

When it comes to choosing a new CEO or another C-suite leader, recent history suggests that most traditional companies pick from a small pool. Approximately 80 percent of new CEOs at large corporations typically come from four roles: chief operating officer, divisional CEO, chief financial officer, or a second-layer management position leading a large business unit.

But in top technology companies that practice looks very different. Tech companies often look to tech-savvy executives to fill open C-suite roles. Amazon tapped AWS (Amazon Web Services) CEO Andy Jassy as its future CEO, taking over for Jeff Bezos following his retirement. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella nabbed the top leadership spot after serving as EVP of the company’s cloud and enterprise group. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and its subsidiary Google, followed a similar path, spending a decade in various tech leadership positions at the company.

When every business becomes a technology business, having a tech-savvy leadership team makes the difference. Tech fluency is a holistic understanding of the impact that digital technologies and AI will have on a business’s success. Having this expertise throughout the senior management team is a key factor for success. In other words, businesses will become irrelevant if top decision-makers are unaware of how technology drives their strategy.

In the age of AI, business is an “infinite game” where innovation disrupts the rules continuously, new players enter the game every day, and nobody can win all the time. In this context, experimentation becomes central to the strategy-making process . Fundamentally, great leaders in the age of AI understand strategy as a dynamic and fluid process based on experimentation and learning—a vastly different process from classic long-term strategic planning.

Leaders must empower the organization with the freedom to test, make mistakes, experiment, and reflect. In the Egon Zehnder–Kearney study, we heard this helpful advice from AI-ready leaders: create room for transparent exploration. Allow people to experiment and play. Leaders who approach AI with a spirit of playfulness boost overall engagement and enthusiasm and create a cultural shift of openness to the new technology.

For years, Walmart has rewarded innovation and risk-taking. At the company’s headquarters, leaders asked their teams to share their worst innovations and biggest failures every week. As a result, people got comfortable running experiments and talking about the results. The biggest failures even earned awards from the company’s leaders, signaling that failure isn’t something to be ashamed of, since failure opens the door to new learning.

Similarly, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella encourages employees to embrace a growth mindset. His leadership shows employees that it’s okay not to know the answer. At Microsoft, his leadership has fueled a culture that rewards experimenting, failing fast, and learning from those experiences.

In the fast-moving age of AI, implementing the business strategy will rely on doing a portfolio of experiments and systematically measuring the outcomes. That constant experimentation creates feedback, which leads to an evolution of the strategy and guides the next round of experiments. As the business grows and evolves, experimentation leads to learning, which informs even more options and experiments. With the right infrastructure in place, this experimental strategy becomes core to lasting success in a business landscape dominated by constant disruption.