I’m an engineer by training, a product guy by heart, and a business guy by trade. At my previous company, Wrike, I managed 1,200 employees at peak. Like most SaaS CEOs at scale, I spent the bulk of my time on go-to-market. That was appropriate then. It’s not appropriate now.Today, at Zencoder, with an engineering team of 50, I find myself doing something unexpected: spending more time on technology than on traditional CEO duties. Not because it’s more personally interesting, though it is, but because that’s where I can create the most value for the business right now.The tempo of AI innovation is so fast that being present in technical discussions allows us to make decisions in real time. We don’t need layers of approval or week-long decision cycles. With the full collective brain of the organization in the room, we can decide on the spot and ship within days, not quarters.AI changed the game from both sidesAI didn’t just reshape our product opportunities and competitive landscape; it changed what’s possible for CEOs to do.Before, keeping up with technological progress inside and outside your organization was nearly impossible. You relied on teams bringing you pre-digested options A and B, and most of the time, you nodded along. Now? I can ask Zencoder any question about our codebase across multiple repos. I can query Claude or ChatGPT about complex technical topics instantly. That keeps me, and everyone on my team, fully in context for critical discussions.You can see the scale of this shift across the market already. The 2025 Stanford AI Index reports that AI is now used inside 78% of organizations, with generative AI embedded in at least one business function at 71% of companies. When that much of the enterprise is already running on AI, technical fluency stops being optional for CEOs.The second enabler is velocity. Quick decisions only matter if you can act on them. When you’re shipping meaningful capabilities weekly, you gain both the freedom and the responsibility to make the right decisions at that same weekly tempo.The quarterly pivot that isn’tOur industry evolves so rapidly that every quarter we ask: “What would I do if I were starting this today?”Then we ask the harder question: “What would I do starting with two years of experience, this brilliant team, this customer base, this technology, these hundred integrations?”From the outside, this pace of change might look like constant pivoting. But day to day, there’s total continuity — it only looks like a pivot if you blink.That blink-and-you-miss-it feeling is structural. The Stanford AI Index again points out just how fast the underlying technology is compounding: training compute is now doubling roughly every five months, with dataset size and training power accelerating alongside it. That pace forces leadership decisions onto a much tighter clock than traditional quarterly planning allows.This isn’t just meI recently spoke with my friend Mikita Mikado, founder and CEO of unicorn PandaDoc. His engineering org is 300 people, six times our size, and he’s made the same shift, diving back into daily product management like the early startup days.Then Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced he’s doing the same thing, at Microsoft scale. He’s handing off business responsibilities to his chief commercial officer so he can focus on “our highest-ambition technical work — across data center buildout, systems architecture, AI science and product innovation.”Think about what that means. With all the layers of hierarchy at Microsoft, some decisions could take weeks or months. Now imagine how quickly they can be made when Nadella is following technical debates in real time and can simply say, “Yes, let’s go.”When technical CEOs should stay technicalIf you’re in AI, whether you’re 50 people, 300, or Microsoft’s scale, and you have the technical chops to be dangerous, this might be your moment.The thing is, more and more businesses are about AI, whether they realize it yet or not. The underlying technologies that drive efficiency, creativity and differentiation are becoming inseparable from AI. Which means the distance between “being in AI” and “being disrupted by AI” is shrinking fast.CEOs who can contribute meaningfully to technical discussions, understand market dynamics deeply and help their organizations make rapid decisions are rebalancing their time. We’re diving into technical debates with teams and customers, trying to keep pace with AI’s breakneck evolution and contribute to decisions that can’t wait for next quarter’s strategy review.This isn’t about nostalgia for our engineering roots. It’s about recognizing that, in this moment and in this industry, technical leadership from the CEO creates disproportionate value. The right question is always “Where does my time create the most impact?” And right now, for many of us, the answer is: in the deep technical discussions, and in the real-time decisions that determine whether we move at the speed of AI or get left behind.This article is published as part of the Foundry Expert Contributor Network.Want to join?
When should CEOs get back in the engine room?
