profile

nerd processor

AI vs. the Fortune 100

Published 5 months ago • 2 min read

​

Change careers, start an AI company

Last week, we looked at CEO and C-suite leaders in the AI 50 to see how many of them have a history of making significant career changes.

76% of the AI CEOs had at least two different kinds of careers before starting their current companies. Interesting but maybe not surprising, since CEO-founders tend to be a non-linear bunch.

More contrary to conventional wisdom is that 64% of other AI C-suiters also have major career changes in their past. They are HR leaders who spent years in product or engineering, ops leaders who are former founders, tech leaders who are former academics, and lots more.

This week, in part 2 of our 4-part series on career changers and incremental growers, we're looking at leadership teams from legacy enterprises to see how they compare. (Subscribe here if you're not already.)

The Fortune 100 is not a monolith

I thought C-suite profiles from the Fortune 100 would make an interesting comparison point with the AI 50, since legacy enterprises are known to attract different kinds of leaders. More pragmatically, I had already collected useful structured data about the Fortune 100 since one of my clients is working on an (unrelated) data story about them. Practicality FTW!

Sure enough, compared to the AI 50, Fortune 100 CEOs and their C-suites are a more conservative bunch when it comes to career change.

Only 17% of Fortune 100 C-suiters have made significant career shifts, compared to 38% of their CEOs. Both of those numbers are much lower than their equivalent rates in the AI 50.

Within the Fortune 100, though, not all industries are the same. Companies in the tech and healthcare sectors have leadership teams with more varied kinds of experience than all other industries.

Tech tracks as an outlier, but healthcare was a bit of a surprise to me. Is that connected to the fact that healthcare is growing at a faster rate than most of the other segments? Could well be.

On the whole, though, AI leaders have more varied career experiences than Fortune 100 execs. On the face of it, this makes sense. Career changers have sought out new kinds of work in their own professional lives, so they may be more likely to gravitate to industries that are less well-established too.

Next up: Are career changers more likely to hire other career changers?

So far, we've seen that AI companies are more likely than established enterprises to be led by career changers. But are career changers more or less likely to hire other career changers? Next week we're diving into that data in installment #3. (Get the whole series and subscribe here.)​

Kieran

Whether you're growing steadily or changing careers, I can help you grow. My coaching clients include startup CEOs, C-suite execs, and ambitious leaders inside large organizations, all leading with founder-level clarity, urgency, and ownership. Ask me about becoming a client!​

​My latest data stories | Build like a founder | nerdprocessor.com​

​

kieran@nerdprocessor.com
​Unsubscribe · Preferences​

nerd processor

Kieran Snyder

Every week, I write a deep dive into some aspect of AI, startups, and teams. Tech exec data storyteller, former CEO @Textio.

Read more from nerd processor

On the hunt Over the last 12 months, I have talked 16 different friends through career transitions. Not clients that I have coached or advised, though there are some of those too. In this case, I'm talking about 16 people I know personally. That's a lot! Some of them have been laid off. Some just want to work somewhere else. Others are just looking to do something different, perhaps a new kind of work or perhaps the same work but on different terms (like freelancing vs. working in-house). A...

about 11 hours ago • 3 min read

Secret agents Last year, I wrote that more than 75% of the AI startups I saw were explicitly pitching job replacement in their fundraising decks (but not always in their sales decks). The majority of these were building some kind of agentic AI. Fast forward to today, and where are we? AI agent as change agent Agentic AI is designed to act autonomously to complete tasks without continuous human oversight. It is typically focused on completing a domain-specific task. For instance, agentic AI...

8 days ago • 3 min read

Turtles all the way down Every big mistake I've made in my career has been a people mistake. The same is true for every leader I know. Contrary to what you might think, the rise of AI is going to make this truer than ever. Case study lies It's common for business school students to analyze business successes and failures. The goal is to identify the patterns that drive success and failure respectively. Typically, B-school case studies focus on the most impactful levers, such as new products,...

15 days ago • 3 min read