New York | Monday, September 21, 2026 | 9am to 5pm, followed by dinner Hosted at Ferrovial | JFK New Terminal One
When AI Begins to Act
For years the question has been what AI can know. The question now is what we are prepared to let it do.
AI is moving from advising the enterprise to acting inside it. Digital agents initiate workflows, execute transactions and negotiate with other systems. Physical systems move vehicles, baggage, energy and people. Most enterprises still run these as separate programs, with separate owners and separate controls. They may not be separate at all. Both run the same loop. Sense, understand, decide, act, learn. One acts on an ERP system. The other acts on a building, a vehicle or a conveyor.
The hype cycle has matured into something more complicated. Real deployments, real disappointments, and open questions about what happens when a system acts and gets it wrong. These sessions are designed to surface what peers are genuinely experiencing, not the polished version.
@ the New Terminal One, JFK
This meeting is hosted at Executive Technology Board member Ferrovial's offices at JFK New Terminal One, a $9.5 billion, 2.6 million square foot operating environment being built for 23 million passengers a year. Software, physical systems, operations, security, labor, regulations and capital infrastructure all meet in one place. Members will experience it in an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour. The facility is part of the conversation, not an interval between sessions.
Agenda & Discussion Track
- From Digital Intelligence to Physical Action. We will discuss what changes when AI becomes an actor rather than an advisor. We will look at where this is working today, where it is not, and what operational constraints models do not understand. And we will ask how trust changes when an AI decision has a physical consequence.
- How Autonomous Should the Enterprise Become. Almost every large enterprise now has AI that monitors, recommends, executes and increasingly initiates. We will work through the degrees of autonomy, from AI that proposes while a person decides, to systems that operate within guardrails while people handle only the exceptions. Every industry draws that line in a different place, and the reasons are the discussion. We may find the real constraint is less about model capability than organizational readiness to act.
- Designing the AI-Native Enterprise. Most companies are organized around function, process, application and human role. We will discuss what changes when the organizing logic becomes objective, workflow, intelligence, agent and human exception. And we will ask the harder question. What would you stop doing altogether, rather than automate?
Meeting Format and Rules
This is our regular board meeting format. Members come prepared with insights, the chair provides a few questions, pressure tests and moderates the discussion, and members lean in to discuss and deliberate. We also hear from our host at Ferrovial on their learnings so far.
Sessions follow Chatham House rules, in a provider-absent, vendor-neutral, peer-group-only board meeting format. There are no slides and no pitches. We foster the exchange of learnings and best practices, and not information that could be viewed as anticompetitive or violative of antitrust laws. A written summary is available to members afterwards.
We connect with attending members to shape the agenda, and send pre-reads ahead of the meeting. Members arrive with a live example and an open question of their own. We ask you to block the entire day, both to take advantage of the forum and as a courtesy to other peer members.
The goal is not consensus; it is collective intelligence.
About the Board
The Executive Technology Board is a global, independent, non-commercial think tank. Its members are more than 250 chief information, technology, digital, data and AI officers from Fortune 1000 and equivalent global enterprises. Over the previous twelve months the board has met with member technology leaders in Amsterdam, London, Seattle, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto. More information here.
This is not a conference, there is no stage and no sponsor program. Membership is by invitation and is limited to the most senior technology executive in an organization.
Summary from our previous meeting: Creating the AI-Native Enterprise
Executive Technology Board (c)