As AI becomes pervasive, CTOs need to talk to clients and educate their bosses

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. This bonus newsletter from Davos explores the strategic relationship between CEOs and chief technology officers. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.

In my previous life as a technology journalist, I wrote and edited countless stories about corporate chief technology officers (CTOs) emerging as key partners to their counterparts in the C-suite. When marketing functions became more data-driven, chief marketing officers clamored for attention from product and engineering. Today, chief financial officers (CFOs) push tech leaders to drive companies’ productivity gains from software and automation even as they scrutinize tech buying decisions.

Now, as artificial intelligence (AI) and agents become pervasive at companies, CTOs have another executive to collaborate with: their bosses. In an interview with Fast Company editor-in-chief Brendan Vaughan during the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Cloudflare cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince and CTO Dane Knecht made the case for technology chiefs as strategic partners to CEOs.

The C-suite syncs up

Prince says Knecht has been instrumental in pushing him to adopt AI beyond fun use cases, such as creating amusing images for company slide presentations or invitations for his kid’s birthday party. “The best CTOs in the world are going to be the ones that are saying to even the 51-year-old or 61-year-old or 71-year-old CEOs, ‘You can do this too,’” says Prince, whose company provides customers with tools to protect and improve the performance of their websites. “And if you can do that, it’s going to actually help you build better companies.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by Nacho De Marco, CEO of global software development company BairesDev. (BairesDev partnered with Fast Company on the event featuring Prince and Knecht.) He says his clients, who turn to the company to help scale their engineering teams, see AI as essential to their future. “When the CEO and CTO are aligned, that transition usually goes really well,” he says.

Knecht, who started out as Cloudflare’s first product manager, eventually took a role building and leading the company’s emerging technologies and innovation (ETI) unit. Prince carved out 10% of the product and engineering budget for innovations that aren’t on any customer’s road map—and might even challenge Cloudflare’s existing business model. Prince credits the division with propelling the company’s growth, saying: “If Dane and the ETI team hadn’t existed, Cloudflare would be yet another CDN [content delivery network].”

Knecht, in turn, says Prince always nudges him to be more ambitious. “You really don’t ever bring Matthew an idea where he says, ‘That’s a good idea,’” Knecht says. “He’ll say, ‘Eh, think bigger.’ It’s always, ‘Think bigger.’”

Two roles, one strategy

Prince says he was somewhat reluctant to promote Knecht to CTO because Knecht was doing such a good job running the innovation skunkworks. However, Prince was impressed with how well he interacted with customers. Knecht has, for now, retained the ETI team as part of his responsibilities.

Indeed, the ability to build relationships with customers is essential for CTOs intent on proving their strategic value to their CEOs. Tal Cohen, president of Nasdaq, says CTOs need to be able to understand how clients use the products their tech teams are building. He also encourages CTOs to become tech translators for their CEOs, helping their bosses understand major technology shifts, whether it’s the latest announcement from Nvidia or a breakthrough in their own industry. “You need to demonstrate that you’re three-dimensional,” adds Cohen, who leads Nasdaq’s Market Services and Financial Technology divisions.

Working with your tech leads

CEOs, how do you engage your CTO on strategy? And CTOs, how do you make sure that you are included in strategic conversations with your CEO? Send your examples and anecdotes to me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. We’ll share helpful examples in a future edition of the newsletter.

Read more: the evolving C-suite

• What’s behind the surge in CFOs becoming CEOs
• Why so few human resources leaders become CEOs
• I’m a CMO who’s friends with my CFO