Wayne Gretzky, the great hockey legend, is credited with saying, “Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” In reality, he didn’t actually say it. His dad, Walter Gretzky, did (1). Regardless of whether it was Wayne or his dad, the same is true today, but in a different context. Today, it’s time for leaders to skate to where the puck is going – and that’s AI!

Leaders of every company, in every country, (see recent announcements at the Paris AI convention this past week) are watching the daily barrage of news and understanding that AI is impacting every part of our lives – personal, financial and professional. The reason is simple. The global AI market is experiencing rapid growth, its size is staggering, and its disruptive forces and potential are overwhelming.

1. Size: The AI market is projected to be $750 billion in 2025, with a projected size of about $3.7 Trillion in 2034, reflecting approximately CAGR of 20% from 2025 to 2034.

2. Growth: This sheer size is fueled by AI’s integration across industries, such as healthcare, finance, retail, and telecommunications, as well as horizontal work flows, like sales, marketing, customer success and finance.

3. Investment: Investors and governments are allocating massive amounts of capital up and down today’s tech stack – from building massive data centers to creating both large and small foundational models; hiring people and doing programing; building, searching and cleansing data; creating and delivering AI professional services.

AI Agents are the Real Growth Opportunity in Today’s Hockey Game

But the real opportunity is to focus on the growth of AI agents and their impact on business performance.

The rise of AI agents is where all the action is going. In short, the focus is moving away from foundational models towards applications that can deployed across companies and industries. AI agents are autonomous systems capable of decision-making and task execution. AI agents are beginning to radically transform industries, much like the internet did 25 years ago. AI agents are not just incremental improvements but disruptive technologies reshaping how businesses leaders design, structure, execute and deliver growth and value.

The AI agent market is projected to reach about $105 billion in 2032, driven by demand for automation and personalized customer experiences. As such, vertical AI companies are emerging in every industry to overtake and replace their 20 year old siblings – Vertical SaaS. And for good reasons. AI agents are less costly to develop, build and operate as businesses than their more structured and now highly ossified SaaS predecessors.

Three Key Trends that Support Today’s New AI Game Strategy

As more and more pundits jump on the article writing bandwagon, it’s increasingly clear that the signal through the noise is that the AI market will provide a winning combination of advantages to the early adopters. In particular, AI agents are already:

1. Revolutionizing business operations: AI agents can scale operations extensively, adapting quickly to changing contexts, and even learn from mistakes. (See prior article by Barry Libert on BPR.) This positions them as a digital workforce capable of complementing human efforts in creative problem-solving and strategic decision-making.

2. Enhancing operating efficiency: AI agents automate complex workflows, reducing cycle times by up to 60%, and cutting general administrative costs. Agents can also retrieve, cleanse and recommend data sets (RAG AI) to help companies train their AI agents to be more effective and efficient at their tasks.

3. Replacing software as the new OS: AI agents are the next generation of SaaS software workflows. Said differently, Vertical AI companies are V2 of vertical software companies (SaaS) used in all industries and corporate work flows from HR and Finance to healthcare and professional services.

Required Strategic Leadership Skills

The best business leaders are increasingly prioritizing AI applications as a competitive necessity. The reasons are simple but mandatory for success at the board and leadership level:

1. Leaders have to make hard decisions to part with their past: AI agents provide data-driven insights that empower leaders to make faster, more informed strategic decisions. This includes predicting trends, optimizing resource allocation and identifying growth opportunities.

2. Leaders need to find a new way to build work forces: AI agents work 24×7 without a break and in a society where AI is moving faster. They learn more and have greater bandwidth than humans. AI agents offer leaders the ability to refine how business will be done – half agents and half employees?

3. Leaders need to create a head of steam and act quickly: AI agents are already helping advanced thinking and acting leaders achieve superior financial performance and operational agility, while at the same time achieving new levels of market valuation from investors.

It’s Not Just About Big Business, It’s Also About Your Own Career (aka YOU)

It’s easy to pass off all these trends as business trends or individuals using LLMs and agents to do their work as part of a company’s activities. Although that is true, it is also true that today’s agents can be used by each and everyone of us to improve our capabilities as the AI world continues to take hold. Here are three next steps for us as individuals:

1. Develop your own personal AI skills: Download or use today’s newest AI tools and enroll in today’s newest AI courses to ensure you become familiar with the capabilities of AI tools (ChatGPT, Perplexity or Claude) and use them in your everyday work.

2. Change your network by changing your company: Although you may not be a native AI person, your selling, marketing, manufacturing, customer success or finance skills still apply. Joining a member of an AI native company creates brand value for you and a network of people that want to play the same game as you – the AI game.

3 Embrace AI first thinking and acting: Think of yourself as a company – e.g. You, Inc and as a leader of your own ‘company’ build a detailed road map for your own development – including skills, networks and leadership roles – so when you look back in 5 years, you have pivoted your career, connections and capabilities.

Summary: It’s time to Skate Quickly and Become AI Centric

It is increasingly clear that the puck is headed towards AI everything. In less than 3 years, the speed of AI play is increasingly fast and furious. Each week a new team enters the AI rink in almost every industry with venture capital to overcome the slower moving companies from the SaaS, services and manufacturing worlds.

If you are not an AI start up or part of one, it’s time to act now or lose the chance to play at the professional AI level. Get started and start skating to where the puck is headed. Vertical AI business models with network effects and data moats – that’s the winning combination. The players that have these attributes are not going to slow down, nor is the speed of play. So get started today or just get ‘checked’ by those that know and are playing this new sport.