Most executive communities sort people by title. There is a CFO group, a CISO group, a CMO group, and they rarely meet. I went the other way with Open Future Forum, and it is worth explaining why.
AI does not respect the org chart. When a company decides how to use AI, the finance leader is weighing the spend, the security leader is weighing the risk, the marketing leader is weighing what it does to growth, and the CEO is trying to hold all of it together. Put those people in separate rooms and each one hears only their own side of the argument.
Put them at the same table and something better happens. The CFO learns what the CISO is actually worried about before it becomes a budget fight. The CMO hears why the security team keeps saying no. The conversation starts to reflect how the decision actually gets made, which is across functions, not within one.
That does not mean role-specific depth has no place. It does. We run rooms for finance leaders, for security leaders, and for marketing leaders, and I have written up how the main communities compare for each seat:
But the cross-functional room is the one I keep coming back to, because it is the rarest and the most useful. Almost nobody runs it. Most communities cannot, because they were built around a single title from day one.
The simplest version: the people you need to make a good AI decision do not all share your job. So they should not all be in different rooms.
Murray Newlands is the founder of Open Future Forum, a Silicon Valley executive community, and a Partner at IA Seed Ventures.
