Some CEOs still don’t understand how important it is to implement AI—and how little time there is left

Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of Norway’s $1.8 trillion sovereign wealth fund, certainly seems to feel that way. After speaking with CEO Daily earlier this month he asked if we could chat again, this time specifically about AI. As a leading investor in many Global Fortune 500 companies including Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet and Amazon, he explained that he’s starting to see disparities between AI leaders and laggards grow by the day.

“AI is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I have never seen a period where a company can pull apart from competition by like 20% in one year. It’s totally unheard of,” he said, hailing SAP, the German software company that recently overtook LVMH to become Europe’s most valuable company, as a case in point.

But those gains don’t come for free, he also warned. To reap them, you need to be serious about it in every part of the organization, starting at the top. And it’s here he is still often frustrated. “If the leader is not relentless about it,” Tangen said, “it won’t happen.”

Similarly, he said, you need “young, tech-savvy” ambassadors who experiment with AI at the base of your organization (and are given appropriate tools to do so); and middle management and compliance departments that act as enablers, rather than actors who stand in the way.

“Companies are turned upside down”, he said. “You see change coming from newly recruited people. In the past, middle managers had to disseminate information from the top. Now [their job] is to pull information from under, and make sure it goes up.”

In an environment where AI is everywhere, including in productivity figures, the time for laggards to catch up is running out. Tangen’s advice? “You just need to implement AI in everything you can. […] People don’t like change. You need to force them.”

At the Norwegian State Investment Fund (NBIM) itself, AI-induced change is well underway, and communicated regularly via Town Halls where use cases are disseminated. And earlier this month, Tangen announced a hiring freeze as a result of its AI productivity gains.

More news below.

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

TOP NEWS

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Goldman CEO's quest to silence critics

After being attacked by internal critics over his leadership and costly expansion of consumer lending, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon told the board he would take action and push out troublemakers he said were undermining him with leaks, the Wall Street Journal reports. The message? "No one is safe if they go up against the CEO."

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The markets

• The S&P 500 fell 0.67% Friday, the last trading day before the long Memorial Day weekend. The index is down 1.3% YTD. 
• S&P futures traded up 1.5% this morning. 
• The Stoxx Europe 600 was up 0.6% in early trading. 
• Asia was mixed: Japan was up 0.5%. Hong Kong up 0.4%. Shanghai was down 0.2% and India’s Nifty 50 was down 0.7%.
• Tesla and Nvidia were up about 2.5% premarket, while Trump Media jumped 13% on an FT report it would raise $3 billion to buy crypto.
• Bitcoin was sitting up at $109,700 this morning.

From the analysts 

• Deutsche Bank on rising bond yields: "Whilst equities were losing ground, it was also a tough week for sovereign bonds thanks to the fiscal concerns, particularly at the long end of the curve. For instance, the 30yr Treasury yield was up +9.3bps last week (+0.2bps Friday) to 5.04%. That was echoed elsewhere, with the German 30yr yield up +4.9bps to 3.08%, whilst Japan’s was up +6.1bps to 3.02% before this morning's big rally," per Jim Reid.
• Convera on the U.S. dollar's woes: !The US dollar index remains near 3-year lows, following its worst week in six, as fiscal uncertainty and shifting trade policies weigh on investor confidence… The USD’s correlation with US term premia has reversed, meaning higher term premia now aligns with a weaker dollar. This shift suggests markets are reassessing the dollar’s safe-haven appeal, trading it based on US policy concerns rather than traditional risk dynamics," per George Vessey et al.
• Goldman Sachs on tariff-related inflation: "We expect tariffs to provide a one-time price level boost that causes core PCE inflation to rebound to 3.6% later this year before coming back down next year… we see the coming inflation rebound as less threatening than the 2021-2022 episode because the cumulative inflation overshoot should be much smaller, the labor market is much less tight and forward-looking wage indicators have so far continued to fall, and household spending power is no longer elevated by fiscal transfers," per Jan Hatzius et al.

AROUND THE WATERCOOLER

U.S. economy will be growing faster than 3% this time next year, predicts Treasury’s Bessent by Christiaan Hetzner

Questions swirl as Tesla nears Austin launch day for high stakes driverless robotaxi launch by Jessica Mathews

Here’s how the Supreme Court could weaken American exceptionalism in financial markets by Jason Ma

Trump will get ‘punched in the face’ by markets if his spending bill passes without a plan for national debt and tariffs, says Wharton professor by Eleanor Pringle

Before he revolutionized tech with Steve Jobs, Jony Ive wanted to quit Apple. Now he’s forging a new power pair with OpenAI’s Sam Altman by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez

This millennial CEO grew up with a heroin addict dad. Now he’s running a multimillion-dollar agency by Orianna Rosa Royle

CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Joey Abrams and Ian Mount.