• Dataiku released a survey Tuesday that found CEOs fear losing their jobs to AI.
• Of the 500 CEOs surveyed, 94% said an AI agent could provide better advice than a board member.
• Dataiku’s CEO told BI that companies need to differentiate themselves through their AI strategy.

For the past six years, the enterprise-AI unicorn Dataiku has hosted an annual “field trip” for the executives of its customer base.

In September, several CEOs who attended the gathering at the Four Seasons in Boston seemed a bit unnerved. AI was gaining traction across the corporate world, and many were concerned about whether they had the right strategies to leverage it.

Dataiku’s CEO Florian Douetteau shared with Business Insider some of the notes he took during the field trip.

Douetteau wrote about a conversation with one CEO, who said: “OpenAI is our brain, but tomorrow Google may come up with something — or another company. If we go all-in with GPT enterprise, or go with Co-pilot, we’ll be locked into one ecosystem. DON’T WANT THIS!”

Douetteau noted another executive saying: “If we can’t fully customize or govern the AI to fit our needs, it feels like we’re letting someone else decide how our business should run. That’s a level of risk I’m not comfortable with.”

Douetteau told Business Insider that among the more than 120 executives who attended, he noticed “a bit of stress” over how to translate the “potentially broad topic of AI” into tangible business gains.

Dataiku, which helps companies manage data, build no-code AI applications, and deploy machine learning models, wanted to drill down on how CEOs feel about work in the age of AI.

On Tuesday, the company published the results of a survey conducted by The Harris Poll of more than 500 CEOs across the UK, US, Germany, and France. The respondents lead companies with over $500 million in annual revenue and more than 500 employees — one quarter are tech companies and the remaining are what Dataiku calls “non-technical.”

Dataiku was especially interested in understanding how non-technical companies are thinking about AI, since they make up the majority of its customer base.

In the survey, 74% of CEOs acknowledged they could be out of a job in two years if they fail to deliver meaningful AI-driven gains. And 94% said that an AI agent could provide better business advice than a human board member.

AI has heightened CEOs’ concerns about competitors, too. More than 70% of CEOs agreed that a fellow CEO could be ousted before the end of 2025 because of a failed AI strategy, while 54% of CEOs said a competitor had already employed a better AI strategy than theirs.

One blind spot that Dataiku identified in its report is the “commodity trap” in which CEOs believe pre-built “off-the-shelf” AI agents are as effective as custom-built agents for a company’s core business operations and verticals.

Executives expressed anxiety in the survey about AI governance, with 94% of CEOs saying they suspect employees are secretly using generative AI tools without official approval. Dataiku has expanded governance tools on its platform to help companies manage the technology, Douetteau said.

For years, companies have sought to differentiate themselves through talent, culture, operations, or marketing. Yet the reality of the next technological era is that “part of what makes a company different will be the type of AI system they have,” Douetteau said.