Name: Succession Spotlight: The Real Power Igniting the AI Data Center Boom
Uploaded: 2026-06-02
Duration: 15 min 11 s

Global demand for AI-driven data centers is forecasted to rise 165% by 2030—and someone has to build it all. Dan Peyovich, who made the jump from COO to CEO of Dycom Industries, is operating at the epicenter of that buildout. In this fireside chat, Peyovich will share the operational playbook that he’s using to transform Dycom into the critical backbone powering the data center boom by installing the fibers that make them run. Hear about the often-overlooked skills shortage that threatens to slow momentum, why human capital is irreplaceable in AI’s growth, and what his COO background gave him that no other path could. 

Dan Peyovich, President and CEO, Dycom Industries
Moderator: Diane Brady, Executive Editorial Director, Fortune; Co-Chair, Fortune COO Summit 

Succession Spotlight: The Real Power Igniting the AI Data Center Boom

Conferences

Good morning. I feel we have to start with something to the hearts and minds of this audience here. We were talking backstage and you said COOs make better CEOs than CFOs. Discuss. Well, you got to start off with a bang, right? Well, I mean, I think why is it better to come up to that than the finance? Absolutely, absolutely. So I started in the trade, so I started out in the field with a shovel in my hand and really worked my way up through pretty much every level that you can go through operations starting at that point. What I saw, uh, and maybe this is a little bit of a generalization, but I would just tell you what I saw from my different vantage points. A lot of times when you get a CFO into a CEO role, they, they really like to pull on the financial levers. But the actual understanding of the operational impacts of what those means, and I'll give you an example, we need to improve cash flow, so let's just extend payment terms with all of our vendors, not understanding exactly what that means with all the teams that have to deal with that on a daily basis, or how you can build in a very durable machine or mechanism to improve cash flow without extending your vendors out or what kind of implications that can mean. Um, just one case in point, but it, it certainly served me well. Triumph of the COO. I love it. Well, let's, let's start before we get into what you've done. I think it's important to talk a little bit about where DICO sits in this scenario with regard to AI data centers. Tell us more about what, what it does. Yeah, we're right down the fairway, so uh we're, we're the largest telecommunications infrastructure services provider in the country. Uh, we have over 20,000 men and women working nationwide and, and really recently we've gotten into the data center space as well with a large electrical acquisition last year, um, that's about 3000 people putting the electrical components into the data centers themselves. What all that means is, is we're quite literally, and this is our, it is our vision statement for the people connecting America. So we might be the men or women bringing internet to your home, to your business, all the way back to the data center where it's getting computer generated. And transmitted. So you were the COO. Then when you became CEOO, you came in and it was like incredibly bold change. So before we get to that, I want to get to the point where it's almost like you're at the window looking in saying when I get this job, things are going to be different. What's it like when you're the COO executing on a vision that you wouldn't have yourself? Yeah, I, I obviously you wanna have alignment in partnership with the CEO as best you can. At the same time, you know what I've always looked at through my career, everything that comes down, I look at it two ways, right? Why did they do that? And then how does it make me feel? And then how does it make our people feel would be the, be the third. But, and then how would I do it differently the next time? So of course, like everybody, you have all these ideas in your mind about, hey, if, if I'm fortunate enough to get to that role, what is it that I would do different, right? How would I make sure that that happens differently? Um, and, and we've made a lot of changes to your point. I mean, we've grown considerably. I think when I started with the company we're a little over $2 billion market cap. We're 15 billion today, um, you know, we doubled our market cap in my first year as CEO, so we have grown quite a bit, uh, doubled our revenue. What did you see that, um, they who shall not be named did not see? What was the opportunity you saw as COO? To, to me I'm a, I'm a people person. Uh, I like being up on stage. I like being around our people. That's where I get my energy for sure and, and I'm absolutely a cheerleader. I think positivity coming from the corner office is incredibly important. I think you can feel if you're in an organization where it's not, I think you can feel that. And so my job is to really bring the room up, right, and give people that mission and alignment, um, so. Sorry, no, I just forgot. So tell me about you know a little bit about the change. What did you see as the opportunity because to your point, you did double in the first year. So what was missing? What was the and a lot of good things and a lot of history with the company, but at the same time we're in. Incredible space in our industry. I mean, the rate of builds, fiber is a new utility. We've got to get it to every home in America, rural and everywhere else on the data center side, everybody knows those headlines and those stories. So how do you lean into that? And I love growth. I think teams love growth. They love to know what a win looks like. They love to go win. So you know, defining that and leaning into it further than we were before took pretty aggressive maneuvers, you know, we did a, we did a $2 billion acquisition when our market cap was about $5 billion. Uh, we did that in my first year. So that's kind of a, not certainly not bet the farm in the company, but you're kind of betting your job a little bit on what that looks like. Uh, but the biggest thing I would say is I really, really lean into our people. I really, really lean into all of our employees and making sure for us we're services business, you know, we have men and women and they're not working with their tools every day. That's where it all starts and stops. This is not a top down organization. I, I work for them. I get up every day and try and figure out how am I gonna drive value to those folks. And I think that that's an important cultural thing. So the playbook for growth, in my experience with CEOs, it's as hard to manage rapid growth as it is to manage a downturn. Give me a sense of your playbook and the space that you're in and what you think you've done. Differently, do you agree? 100% agree with that. 100% agree. I see many, many companies that go into disaster trying to grow too fast. I see many, many companies that that happens with, and you even see it happening today across our space. The companies just struggle to do that. Uh, so I use two words in our business. I use alignment and I use accountability. Are we aligned? Does everybody know what the mission is? And, and, and these are both bidirectional, right? It's not just me telling everybody what it is. Am I receiving all the feedback as well? And if you have alignment, then the question is, do you have an accountable organization? Because if you're gonna grow and grow fast, if you're not accountable, then things are gonna fall apart, right? Things are gonna get dropped. And, and so really testing and understanding that accountability. Um, understanding where your business is and where you are on those two tracks is paramount before you can start to grow, because if you're not dialed in here and nobody's ever at 100%, but you gotta be doing pretty well, there's no way you can ask your team to grow that much. So you need to understand what is your team capable of, and you also need to understand what are they capable of, because I also see companies that they're afraid to put that on their folks. Oh, I don't have the right people. I don't have the right team. They haven't done this before. You're dealing with skill shortages though, right? Not still people shortages. How are you dealing with that? Yeah, well, well, skills all around quite often and the same for me when I moved in the CEO role, you know, we have had leadership teams change out, right? I think that's very common. Um, you know, we're trying to get the skills the business needs as we move forward and then throughout the workforce there's no doubt there's a skilled trade shortage. Now, being a big skilled trades advocate, um, I get really excited to talk about that. I, I, I'm still hopeful that in my lifetime that people really see that as being just as an attractive track as going to the college. You wanted to be a carpenter, didn't you? I did, yeah, I, I, I mean that's how I started and it was, I really enjoyed it, right? I mean, I wanted to make more money, but you know, I really enjoyed what I did. Um, so yeah, but filling the skilled workforce in today's world is not like it used to be because you don't have people that have had a lot of outside elements exposure or worked on farms that you can pull in. You're really taking somebody that, you know, I use, I use the joke, but it's not really a joke because I have, I have two college kids, you know, the kid that was playing Xbox and mom and dad's couch, and you're gonna try and upskill them to be out in the elements working with tools, working with customers, working in difficult situations, and, and that's a tall order. So you are in the AI infrastructure space. I'd be remiss not to ask how AI is impacting you internally as well, especially when you're such a decentralized, you know, people first organization. Absolutely. The first part is it is it is a great time to be in the skilled trades, right, because. As we stand today and for as far as we can see into the future, somebody still has to be out there working with their hands. The question is, how can we use AI to add value to that? And there's a lot of ways you can think about it. How do we make people safer by using technology, right? And, and when I say technology, it includes AI, but it's other things too. I mean, if you think about. Uh, LiDAR or just some of the camera technology that you have today is way different than you had before. Now you pair that, you know, with an AI engine. What can you do to make things safer? What can you do to make sure quality or some of those things that people just don't want to spend time on, you know, ensuring we have to ensure that everything we bury is a certain depth. How do you do that more effectively and efficiently with AI because somebody sitting there looking at pictures all day every day is probably not their most favorite thing. Um, so that's how we're really leaning into it again, Diane. It's just like I said about myself. How do we drive value to the workforce and value to our customers? That has to be the mantra for us. Um, what we're going to take, if you have questions in the audience, just raise your hand, and we have a mic runner, I believe. So if I see any, but one of the things you also mentioned back that I hope you don't mind me asking, you, um, you write thrillers in your, in your spare time was just between us. That was, but, but let me ask, and I think I'm now I'm actually going to get embarrassed up here, but go ahead, don't get. Embarrassed, but I'm curious that both the experience of carpentry, the experience of being a storyteller, how has that helped you as a CEO in this role that you're in that's a very sort of tech centric role? I just think if you think about the landscape today, you know, information is not the problem. I mean, since the advent of the internet, but certainly with where AI is today, IQ certainly matters, but that EQ side and just understanding how to read people, understanding whatever. Everybody's looking for, right, what people want to succeed, right? They wanna come to work. They wanna do something that matters. They wanna provide value. They wanna have constructive feedback even though in the moment they might not wanna have it. All of those things, and I think really just shaped for me my career path. Um, one of the very first things that I did when I came into the role, it, I have a lot of sayings. Um, I also tell a lot of jokes, but I'm not telling anything. Oh, OK, well, we're ready, but I have a lot of sayings. But, but, um, one of them is, is that, you know, salary, salary is how you attract people. But benefits is how you show me care. It really is. Benefits is how you show me care. Easiest place to cut, and I'll go back to my COO, CFO example. Easiest place to cut benefits. You've got 30 million bucks and you're still gonna keep a workforce because you know you're still gonna keep a workforce. Uh, the very first thing we did is we invested heavily into our benefits, you know, we gave, we have, you take somebody that comes into Icom from the skilled, never been in the skilled trades before, they're starting hourly, hourly wage, and they get 2 weeks of vacation. Not a lot of businesses do that. Why? Because it costs money, right? That's real revenue that they're not putting in place when they're out. But I am. 100% convinced I'm going to get far more than that 2 weeks after that individual because they, they value that we value them. So I want to go back quickly to the COO to CO CEO transition. So many of the people in this audience are COOs. You talk about alignment and how it makes you feel when you're getting a vision that may not necessarily be. Your own, how did you succeed in that role when you knew you would do the CEO job differently? Yeah, and, and there were times that I was surprised, right? I mean, again, I, I think you have to have an open mind to all of these. There's plenty of times that some something came down and I went, well, this isn't gonna work, and then it certainly did. Now I am a believer, remember alignment and accountability. If I'm in a room, you know, once I was at a level where I'm in that leadership room, once we walk out, we're all saying the same thing. You have to, right, even if in the back of my head I'm going. I'm not sure that this is gonna work, uh, but the other part is, is you have to create an organization where people can give you good feedback because if nobody's gonna tell you that the new software deployment we build a lot of our own software tools for the work we do out in the field, if nobody's gonna tell you that the new one sucks, that it's terrible, everybody's just gonna say you're the, you know, you're in the leadership pool, it's great, then you're just not gonna have an effective organization. CEO, you tend to be in that role. I mean, what did you have to unlearn to get to the top job? A lot, a lot of things that I'm still learning today. I, I think the part that can't be understated is that people do view you differently in the CEO seat. They really do. And I thought coming from a COO role where I was highly active across the business to move to that role, that would be pretty similar. It's, it's really not. And so you really have to parse through what people wanna tell you to what they need to tell you. And from the perks that you occupy with the AI revolution and such, is there anything you think is underappreciated in terms of how we're talking about this? There's been so much attention on the LLMs, the data centers, labor. Give us a sense in sort of the final few minutes as to what's on your radar you want to put on ours from a. Future point of view, yes, the AI race runs directly through the skilled workforce. I mean it really does. You, you have men and women that are out there working with their tools to do that and to stand up an organization, you know, we have over 20,000 people nationwide on our communications side. We have about 17,000. That's across all 50 states and our average crew size, I'm gonna pause for effect, our average crew size is less than 3 people and so standing up an organization providing all of the training Diane that we talked about to somebody who's never been in the workforce that has to deal with a customer, a homeowner, maybe a barking dog as well, um, you know, it's gotta deal with municipalities, gotta deal with road traffic and stay safe. And by the way, they also have a very technical job to do. Uh, incredibly difficult to stand up at scale, um, and you know, again, I do have a lot of lines. Uh, give us some lines. Another one, give us a line you'd give to a three person crew. Well, for us, well, scale is local, right? Scale is local. Our scale really starts and ends with how those 3 people interact, right? How they interact with the customer, how they deliver on that end product, how they, you know, execute with the homeowner, and so scale really is local, and you have to start there, and then you can build up. To be the size and scale that we are um, and so let's go back. Let's end on the growth path that you've been on or you can continue to be on, um, how do you, uh, does the culture change when you're in this heavy growth mode and what sort of, what are you telling to people who often are worried about their jobs? Now you're in a position where you can't hire fast enough. How do you change your messaging around that? I, I think it's all in a similar place because yes we are hiring like crazy, but we're also looking hard at the organization and how we can be more effective, how can we be more efficient. So you know there are places where you have to look at roles and say, hey, this is what this role was doing before, but it needs to do something different today. You have to be thoughtful and all of that. Uh, again, I come back to for the kind of growth that we're under which has been significant over the last couple of years and we see that going for many years out in the future. One, you do have to give your, your organization breathers, right? You gotta give them breathers. You can't be pedal to metal the whole time, but I go back to where we started. The biggest thing is you have to be positive, right? People wanna know, are we winning? Are we winning? Am I winning? Am I doing what the organization needs me to do the most? And if so, you got to run around and give everybody high fives. I mean, on a late Friday after everybody's been working really hard, you've got to run around and you've got to tell everybody that they're doing. I use a word in between, but good job. I'm not going to say the word in between. You got to tell people that because they want to know, are we winning, right, because if people know you're winning and they know that that growth is important in that, the other part is they gotta know you want to grow. But at the end of the day, if you can show people that you're winning, you can show that what they're doing is producing results, that's just gonna be rocket fuel for your. I love it. Big high five for Dan. Thank you so much.