YPO Technology Network · Agentic AI Summit

The Climb How companies actually get fast with AI.

Fast people don't make a fast team. Fast teams don't make a fast company.
Amandeep Khurana Anthropic · YPO SF Bay
Kathy Slowinski Trilogy · YPO Park City
Ankur Gupta Mithai.ai · YPO Chicagoland
Why this page exists

Every part of your business can speed up while the whole thing stays the same speed. That's not a paradox. It's a ladder, and each rung breaks differently.

Find your rung. Make the next move.

RUNG 1 Fast people Individuals using AI on their own work
RUNG 2 Fast teams A team runs AI inside how the work moves
RUNG 3 Fast company AI works across teams, on shared knowledge
01

Sort your AI work

Three kinds. Most of the money quietly piles up in the one that changes the least.

1
People using AI tools ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity on your team's laptops. Useful, expected, and not a strategy.
2
How work moves through the company Support tickets, renewals, invoicing, contracts, onboarding. Work that crosses desks. Your cost structure was never people typing slowly. It's work waiting in handoffs. This is the climb. The rest of this page is about this row.
3
AI inside what you sell The part your customers touch. Real, exciting, and a different conversation. That's product risk, not operating model.

One warning before you sort: don't bolt AI onto the process you already have. Bolted on, you get twenty to thirty percent on a good day. Redesigned around it, you get a different speed. The companies that won the cloud didn't move their old servers across. They rebuilt.

02

What makes a team fast

It's never a better model. It's whether the AI got onboarded or just got a login.

Everyone has the same models. The system you build around them is the key, both people and technology. Four blocks:

ContextWhat it knows
Everything it needs to do the job your way: products, pricing, what good looks like, what you tried before and why it failed. Could an AI find that tomorrow, or does it live in people's heads?
ToolsWhat it can do
Chat AI advises. Tool AI acts in your systems: read access wide, write access narrow, a human signature on anything that can't be undone. Can yours act, or only talk?
MemoryWhat it keeps
It starts every session from zero unless someone writes things down: decisions, corrections, edge cases, what worked. Does anything it learns on Tuesday still exist on Wednesday?
FeedbackHow it improves
A standing review where every correction gets written back in, so a mistake becomes a one-time mistake. When it's wrong, does the fix get encoded or repeated?
03

What makes a company fast

The wall everyone hits, including the companies that do this for a living.

"Every team got faster. The company did not. We built prosthetics, not a body."

Every team fast, each on its own platform, nothing talking to anything. The work that's actually worth money, shipping a product, closing a renewal, crosses engineering, sales, legal and ops. Nobody fixed that part, so the bottleneck just moved downstream.

What closes it is the same four blocks with one word added: shared. Context that survives across people and teams. Tools with shared access. Memory that outlives one person's session. A feedback loop the whole company learns from, not just whoever hit the problem.

And one front door. Nobody should have to remember which AI does what. One place to ask, and the system routes it. The technology absorbs the complexity, not the employee. Sierra, a company whose entire business is AI agents, built one agent per department and it failed. Their words: the most important work happens across teams, not within them.

04

The people part

No rung climbs on technology alone. This part is yours, not your CTO's.

Go first. Your calendar is your strategy. Buying Claude and calling yourself AI-forward is buying a gym membership and wondering where your six-pack is. The floor for a leader is four hours a week in the tools, personally.
Keep a weekly beat, together. Whole team, every week, even the weeks with nothing new. It works because people see each other's work. Nobody learns this from a course.
Expect the dip. Teams burn out, stall, then it flips and they start asking for more time. It's never a straight line, and quitting at the low point is how this dies.
Don't outsource it. Outside help speeds you up, but it only sticks when someone inside owns it. Pair the person who knows the work with the person who knows the tools.
05

If you're here, do this next

We're the first generation of leaders managing both humans and agents.

There's no playbook. Get in the arena and play. This is how we'll figure it out. The best day to start was yesterday. The next best is today.