CEOs Can No Longer Win by Being Right, Lumen's Kate Johnson Says

By Olivia Hart

More than 80% of chief executives at AI-first companies now engage partners from external or specialized networks to discuss risk and pool strengths, according to IBM's 2026 CEO Study. That figure anchors a shift Lumen Technologies CEO Kate Johnson described Tuesday at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, Calif.: the boardroom is no longer rewarded for being right.

"This notion of the boardroom and the conference room that I grew up in—we were rewarded for being right. We had to know our stuff. We had to be the best. We had to come in with a strong opinion. We had to have all the facts we had to master, and that is just not possible in today's market," Johnson told Fortune's Diane Brady.

The claim deserves scrutiny. Johnson runs a telecom carrier that has staked its future on AI-driven demand for network capacity. Her argument for permanent, partner-based course correction conveniently lowers the bar for what a CEO must know in advance. Still, the survey data behind her point is real, and it says decision cycles are compressing as AI adoption accelerates.

What does Johnson propose instead of certainty?

She told Brady that executives must "build a machine" for decision-making. The machine works in steps:

• Form a hypothesis
• Read incoming signals continuously
• Consult experts inside and outside the company
• Course-correct constantly

"I'm getting signals every day, and we're pivoting every day," Johnson said. "My job is to get a grant and to allocate the capital accordingly, and you have to have a bench of partners that you can go to to deliver those outcomes."

In plain words: the CEO's job shifts from having answers to renting them fast. That framing puts a premium on who you know, and Johnson has data on her side that the market is moving the same way.

Is M&A losing ground to partnerships?

Boston Consulting Group's 2025 research on strategic partnerships found that 60% of surveyed business leaders expect joint ventures and partnerships to matter more to growth than mergers and acquisitions over the next three to five years. BCG attributes the shift to a slowdown in M&A activity.

That is a survey of intent, not results. Companies may say they prefer alliances while deal pipelines recover. But if even half follow through, the finding implies a structural change in how corporate growth gets financed over the next half-decade.

How did Lumen put this into practice?

Lumen found its partner in consultancy EY. In June 2025, EY U.S. and Blue Planet, a division of Lumen, formed a strategic alliance to advance AI-driven autonomous networking for communication service providers. Lumen was the alliance's first client.

The deal did not start in a conference room. Johnson approached EY CEO and Global Chair Janet Truncale at a Business Roundtable breakfast a few years ago. Johnson said she asked Truncale: "Will you be my best friend?"

"And I was happy to oblige," Truncale told Brady.

Truncale said the exchange changed how she greets newcomers to the corner office. "In the last two years, I've frankly tried to pay that forward," she said, "so when there are new CEOs, I try to reach out and say, 'Hey, I've just been through this.'"

The anecdote is charming, and it is also the weakest link in the argument. One breakfast invitation is not a strategy, and neither IBM's engagement statistics nor BCG's survey measure whether partnership-heavy companies actually outperform. What the evidence does show is direction: AI is compressing decision timelines, and CEOs are responding by widening their circles rather than deepening their expertise.

For Lumen, the test of Johnson's "machine" will be visible in capital allocation and the EY-Blue Planet alliance's results, not in summit-stage philosophy.