You tap your phone and a stranger appears at your door with your groceries. You click through a cash back portal and a package of clothes arrives two days later. These transactions feel effortless—and that effortlessness is entirely manufactured by a layer of operational leaders whose actual job is to make sure you never think about them at all.
But right now, those leaders are telling a different story, and that’s because they’re exhausted.
The second wave hits before the first one passed
At the Fortune COO Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona, Adrienne Down Coulson, COO of Rakuten International — the company behind one of the world’s largest cashback shopping platforms—and Tom Maguire, Head of Operations at Instacart, put language to something many of their peers are feeling but not yet saying out loud.
Down Coulson has a name for what she’s observing across the C-suites she works in and around, a concept she calls “reinvention exhaustion.” It’s something more specific and more structural than just burnout. “The same leaders who are being tasked with this reinvention and total transformation today are the same ones that led companies through massive restructurings, COVID-19, all the geopolitical stress and strife,” she said. “Not a lot of time in between to breathe.” They never got to recover, instead absorbing the next thing. And now the next thing is the biggest ask yet, whether everything they built their careers on is still relevant at all.
COVID asked leaders to execute under extreme pressure. AI is asking them to question whether the way they’ve led and the skills they’ve spent careers building are still relevant at all.
Their real job is managing the people who run things
Both executives operate above the day-to-day. Down Coulson oversees multiple business units at Rakuten, each with its own C-suite. Maguire sits atop a live operations infrastructure handling millions of grocery orders daily. Their actual work is less about running functions than about orchestrating the executives who do—managing where decisions stall, where trust breaks down between peers, where organizational gears start to grind.
And for years, the way that grinding got managed was by absorbing it. Down Coulson offered one of the most candid admissions of the panel when she turned the lens on herself.
“I have been an absorber of friction,” she said. “And that’s removing it from the other people around the table, but it doesn’t get rid of it. It doesn’t fix it.”
Under normal conditions, friction absorption works well enough. But these are not normal conditions, haven’t been for years and show no sign of normalizing soon.
AI raised the bar. Now operations has to clear it
Meanwhile, the operational complexity underneath those frictionless consumer experiences keeps growing. Instacart customers now expect real-time, personalized substitutions when their preferred items are out of stock—not whatever’s nearest on the shelf, but the right replacement, drawn from their own purchase history and surfaced to a shopper standing in the aisle in seconds. “AI is raising the bar,” Maguire said. “It’s making customers have a set of expectations around speed, around personalization, even better and stronger.”
At Rakuten Rewards, the answer to fragmented data and siloed analyst teams came in the form of an AI agent which lives inside Slack and answers questions about the platform’s 17 million members in 20 seconds. What once required weeks of back-and-forth across marketing, engineering, finance, and commercial teams now happens in the time it takes to send a message, a friction eliminated.
The question no one can fully answer yet
Maguire’s prescription for exhaustion is to stop iterating and commit to transformation wholesale—skip to the end, move the metric 40 points instead of one, give teams something worth running toward instead of an endless treadmill of marginal gains.
Down Coulson’s answer, as she recently wrote in a commentary for Fortune, goes deeper: the C-suite model itself needs reinvention. Leaders built on deep functional expertise inside neat silos aren’t equipped for AI, which cuts horizontally across every function at once. The executives who figure out how to build cross-enterprise judgment—and stop absorbing the friction that’s been slowing them down—are the ones whose companies will come out ahead.
“The companies that win at the end of the day are not going to be those that pick one technology over another,” she said. “But really the ones that face the hard calls at that leadership level.”
The elves are tired. The magic still has to happen. Something has to give.
For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.
