Amid geopolitical uncertainty and the AI boom, executive leadership has had to become a much less insular affair.
Lumen Technologies CEO Kate Johnson, speaking at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in Santa Barbara, Calif. on Tuesday, said that as companies have had to become more nimble in their decision-making, it’s no longer realistic for them to rely only on their respective leaderships to make tough calls and should instead rely on partnerships between, not just within, C-suites.
“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.
Johnson explained that instead, you have to “build a machine” for decision-making, which includes coming up with a hypothesis, but then looking at signals, as well as experts inside and outside a business to inform constant course-correction.
“I’m getting signals every day, and we’re pivoting every day,” she added. “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.”
IBM has already begun to measure changes in how CEOs are interacting with one another. More than 80% of chief executives of AI-first companies are engaging partners from external or specialized networks to talk about risk and build off each other’s strengths, according to its 2026 CEO Study. A large part of that shift comes from rapid changes in AI and how workplaces are adopting it, compressing decision-making cycles and forcing companies to break down previously established boundaries in search of cooperation, the report noted.
More broadly, Boston Consulting Group similarly observed that as mergers and acquisitions slow, companies are instead looking for alliances, with 60% of surveyed business leaders saying that over the next three to five years, joint ventures and partnerships will be more important to growth than pursuing M&A.
Lumen Technologies found one such partner in consultancy EY. In June 2025, EY U.S. and Blue Planet formed a strategic alliance to improve autonomous networking with AI, and Lumen was the project’s first client.
Johnson’s initial connection with EY CEO and Global Chair Janet Truncale was a spontaneous one. Johnson approached Truncale at a Business Roundtable breakfast a few years ago and in hopes of improving her day, Johnson said to Truncale, “Will you be my best friend?”
“And I was happy to oblige,” Truncale told Brady.
The interaction shifted Truncale’s own approach in meeting new leaders.
“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.’”