What You Missed at WOBI on AI & Business Transformation

By now, most leadership teams have run an AI pilot. Far fewer have much to show for it: a recent MIT report put the share of generative AI pilots with no measurable return at 95%. That figure kept coming up across WOBI on AI & Business Transformation, raised independently by speakers who hadn’t compared notes, and it set up the real question behind both events. Not whether to adopt AI, but how to do it without ending up in that 95%.

Across two events, one in Medellín and one in Madrid, WOBI brought together world-renowned business thinkers and practitioners to answer it. If you couldn’t make it, here’s the short version, speaker by speaker.

In Medellín

Terry Gutiérrez — The Leader’s Algorithm (AI & Leadership)

Terry Gutiérrez, Managing Director of Tesla in Mexico and Latin America, treated leadership itself as an algorithm.

• More change is coming in the next 20 years than in the last 200, yet most leaders respond by working harder rather than deciding better.
• Her “leader’s algorithm” rests on strategy, processes and talent. Layer AI onto a broken process and it only amplifies what was already broken.
• The real engine is purpose, the “for what” behind the work, a point she anchored in her own story of surviving a near-fatal accident at 17.

Nathan Furr — The Three Pitfalls of Transformation Using AI (AI & Strategy)

If AI is supposedly bigger than fire, why do 95% of generative AI initiatives return nothing? Nathan Furr, a professor at INSEAD and former Stanford faculty member, blamed the approach, not the technology.

• Start from the customer’s problem, not the tool. Every failed initiative he studied was busy solving a non-problem.
• Treat it as a people challenge: the best person to lead an AI push is rarely the youngest “AI guru,” but someone who can carry the organization through the change.
• Experiment with discipline instead of scattering “10,000 flowers,” and reframe the goal, not how to avoid being disrupted, but how to become the best in your field.

Giuseppe Stigliano — Smart Marketing Strategies for the Age of AI (AI & Marketing)

Giuseppe Stigliano, co-author of three books with Philip Kotler and several international bestsellers of his own, spoke in both cities with the same through-line: AI isn’t a tool, it’s a general-purpose enabler of work.

• Marketing is shifting from human to agentic interaction, a new map of A2C, A2B and A2A relationships.
• Brands now have to be visible and trustworthy not only to people, but to the agents acting on their behalf.

His one line that became the unofficial motto of both events:
“Content can be generated by AI, but context must remain human.”

María Fernanda Galeano — Cities That Think / Ciudades que piensan (AI & Growth)

María Fernanda Galeano, Medellín’s Secretary of Economic Development, was the one speaker who took AI out of the company and into the running of a city.

• A city’s future won’t be set by its technology, but by the decisions it makes with it.
• “Humans + machines = productivity” is too narrow; she adds human and social intelligence and calls the combination “innovation for wellbeing.”
• The real asset is the “human algorithm,” its people, and she backed it with hard outcomes: lower homicide and dropout rates.

Andrew Mayne — From Inside the AI Revolution: The OpenAI Case (AI & Innovation)

Andrew Mayne brought a vantage point few could match, OpenAI’s first prompt engineer and host of The OpenAI Podcast, and after tracing the arc from the 1958 origins of neural networks to ChatGPT, he got practical.

• The “Blank Page Problem”: companies buy the subscriptions, then watch staff freeze in front of an empty box because no one named the problem to solve.
• Adoption is a culture question, sharing in small “Junto”-style groups and enough psychological safety to admit you use the tools at all.
• His read on the stakes stays optimistic: AI is like fire, risky if mishandled but worth building for what it makes possible.

In Madrid

Silvia Leal — Leadership in the Post-AI Era (AI & Leadership)

Silvia Leal, an international expert in technology and future trends who works with the OECD and IE, opened Madrid with a flat statement: AI is no longer an edge, it’s the baseline for competing at all.

• The leader’s question isn’t whether to adopt AI, but how, without sliding into either paralysis or impulse.
• Move from fear to curiosity, and make continuous learning a habit: “learn, or fall behind.”
• The lasting advantage isn’t working like a machine; it’s doubling down on what machines can’t replicate, judgment, empathy, creativity, critical thinking.

Ángel Zuate — The Transformative Impact of AI on Business Management (AI & Strategy)

Ángel Zuate, Senior Vice President of Product and AI Strategy, made the numbers case: the debate has already moved from “if” to “how.”

• The prize is large and close. A Google/BCG study values global labor at $50–60 trillion, and PwC sees efficiency gains from 5% in marketing and sales up to 40% in procurement.
• Most pilots stall on four barriers: disconnected “Frankenstein” systems, data privacy, the fear of losing operational control, and regulatory uncertainty.
• The winners won’t be those with the most advanced technology, but those who adopt earlier and more rigorously, aimed at real problems and the people who solve them.

Nathalie Nahai — Humans + AI: Building Teams with Empathy and Agency (AI & Talent)

Nathalie Nahai, a behavioural psychologist and author of Webs of Influence, supplied the humanist counterweight in Madrid.

• Watch for “cognitive surrender”: handing our decisions to chatbots the moment we feel overwhelmed.
• And “cognitive debt”: thinking skills that quietly atrophy from disuse.
• The fixes are human, not technical, “critical ignoring,” clear rules for how tools get used, and trust as a real asset, because the deeper question is ethical: what kind of world do we want to build?

One Conversation, Two Cities

The speakers didn’t coordinate. And yet the same MIT number, 95% of pilots failing, came up again and again across both events, and so did the same diagnosis. Almost no one blamed the technology itself. The failures they described came from layering AI on top of processes that were already broken, which only automates the mess instead of fixing it. The second shared instinct was restraint: AI can generate the content, run the analysis and draft the options, but the call on what actually matters has to stay human. Different speakers, different industries, same conclusion. In the age of AI, what separates companies isn’t the technology everyone now has. It’s what they do with it.

The Conversation Continues: World Business Forum 2026

The conversation doesn’t end here. It continues, deeper and with more voices, at the World Business Forum 2026, built around a single idea: Transcend. Across six cities, some of the world’s most influential business thinkers will help leaders cut through the noise and turn AI from experiment into advantage:

• Bogotá — October 28–29
• Nueva York — November 4–5
• Sídney — November 5–6
• Mexico City — November 10–11
• Madrid — November 17–18
• Milán — November 18–19

Find the full program and secure your place at the World Business Forum nearest you.