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Artificial intelligence has become a defining force in the global economy, yet many corporate leaders continue to underestimate the urgency of its impact.

Ask 10 CEOs if AI will fundamentally change their business, and at least nine will say yes. They see the wave coming; they acknowledge its power in the abstract.

Now ask a follow-up: “So, what are you doing to radically transform your company for this new reality?” The answers become evasive. You will hear about pilot programs in siloed departments, innovation hubs neatly quarantined from core operations, and internal task forces assigned to “study the issue.”

In other words, they are waiting. They are waiting for disruption to appear in a rival’s quarterly report, for ROI to become undeniable, for someone else to de-risk the path forward. They are asking when the revolution will arrive. It is the most dangerous question they could be asking.

To understand why, consider Alfred Loomis, a Wall Street titan and amateur scientist of the 1920s. Loomis was famous for two things: helping to perfect the radar that won World War II, and predicting the 1929 market crash with uncanny precision. He was a master at seeing an inevitable future and acting on it before it became consensus reality.

By late 1928, observing the market’s speculative frenzy, he sold every stock he owned. He could not understand why his smartest friends, who privately agreed the market was a house of cards, kept asking him when he thought the crash would happen. They were obsessed with trying to time the inevitable, hoping to extract every last dollar from a bull market that had risen an astonishing 38 percent in a single year.

Loomis thought this was madness. His principle was simple: once you are convinced a paradigm-shifting event is inevitable, the only prudent action is to begin preparing immediately, as if it were already here.

He later applied the same logic to the looming threat of war, arguing that a nation convinced of an impending conflict must shift to a war footing immediately, forgoing the “peace dividend” to secure its future. The potential gain of waiting, he said, is trivial compared with the existential risk of being unprepared.

Today, corporate leaders are making the same mistake as Loomis’s friends, clinging to a “peace dividend” of operational stability while the world shifts toward a new kind of conflict.

This is not another tech cycle; it is a fundamental rewriting of the rules of competition. Your primary threat is no longer your traditional competitor, unless they are the ones who have stopped asking “when.”

The future of your company will be determined not by the arrival of AI, but by your actions in this brief, deceptive calm before its full impact is felt.

Mohammed A. Al-Qarni 

The true existential threat is the AI-native mindset, whether it emerges from a well-funded startup or a newly agile rival. This new competitor operates with a radically different cost structure. A team of ten, armed with powerful AI agents, can now perform the discovery, analysis, creation, and distribution work of a thousand knowledge workers.

In this environment, the cautious, incremental approach is the riskiest strategy of all. The narrow window for action is now.

The response cannot be another line item in the IT budget. It requires a complete cultural and operational shift to an “AI-first” model. The guiding question must change from “How can AI help us do what we currently do?” to “If we were founding our company from scratch today with these tools, what would we do?”

That means mandating that every workflow, from marketing to finance to R&D, be reimagined. It means redefining what an “A-player” is — not just an expert in their field, but one who can achieve a tenfold output by leveraging AI. It requires a painful but necessary commitment to reskilling and restructuring the workforce for a new reality of human-AI collaboration.

For business leaders in ��������, this global dynamic carries a unique and urgent implication. The Kingdom’s ambitious Vision 2030 has opened the doors to a wave of international enterprises incentivized to establish a major presence here.

These new competitors are not just bringing capital; they are bringing a global best-practice mindset. Many will be AI-native from day one, posing a direct threat to local incumbents who choose to wait.

This is not merely a challenge; it is a strategic imperative. For Saudi enterprises, aggressively adopting an AI-first model is the only way to not just compete with these new entrants, but to leapfrog them, securing a leadership position on the regional and global stage in alignment with our national vision.

History will not judge today’s leaders on their quarterly earnings. It will judge them on their foresight and courage. The choice is stark: preside over a comfortable, profitable decline into irrelevance, or lead a difficult, urgent, and necessary transformation into a market leader for the next generation.

The future of your company will be determined not by the arrival of AI, but by your actions in this brief, deceptive calm before its full impact is felt.

The time for prediction is over. The time for preparation is now.

• Mohammed A. Al-Qarni is an academic and consultant on AI for business.