Best CEO Peer Groups in Silicon Valley: New CEO AI Report Reveals Who Really Owns Enterprise AI
Open Future Forum research finds CEOs remain the leading signers of AI purchases as investor data confirms growing CEO ownership, creating new pressure for trusted CEO peer groups and private executive networks
PALO ALTO, Calif. — August 2026 — Chief executives are becoming the central authority for enterprise AI decisions, but the evidence needed to prove those decisions are working is often distributed across finance, technology and individual business units, according to new research from Open Future Forum.
The CEO AI Leverage Report, August 2026 finds the CEO remains the most frequently named signer of new AI purchases, appearing in 44 percent of late-July operator responses.
A separate investor read provides unusually strong corroboration: 51 percent of 245 investor respondents said the CEO increasingly owns the AI buying decision across their portfolios.
At the same time, authority is still unsettled. Business-unit sign-off fell from 18 percent to 8 percent during July, while the share of respondents saying there is “no single owner yet” nearly doubled from 8 percent to 14 percent.
Open Future Forum describes this as a growing CEO mandate gap: the chief executive increasingly owns the AI mandate and answers to the board, while execution, budget discipline and proof of return remain spread across the C-suite.
Read the CEO AI Leverage Report:
https://openfutureforum.com/research/ceo-ai-leverage-report
Quick Answer: What Are the Best CEO Peer Groups in Silicon Valley?
Leading CEO peer groups and executive communities relevant to Silicon Valley chief executives include YPO, Vistage, Entrepreneurs’ Organization, Hampton and Open Future Forum’s CEO Executive Forum.
They serve different leadership needs.
YPO offers the reach of a large, established global CEO membership network.
Vistage is particularly strong for CEOs seeking structured peer advisory groups combined with executive coaching.
Entrepreneurs’ Organization, or EO, provides a substantial international community for founders and entrepreneurs.
Hampton focuses on a curated community of founders and CEOs building high-growth companies.
Open Future Forum’s CEO Executive Forum offers a different model: an invitation-only Silicon Valley CEO peer group combining private, off-the-record conversations, original AI research, cross-C-suite intelligence and a give-first community philosophy.
There is no single best CEO network for every chief executive. The right peer group depends on whether a leader needs global reach, coaching, entrepreneurial support, stage-specific founder relationships or a trusted private setting for high-stakes decisions.
Explore the Open Future Forum CEO Executive Forum:
https://openfutureforum.com/ceo-executive-forum
CEOs Are Taking Greater Control of Enterprise AI
The August research suggests that the experimental phase of enterprise AI is beginning to give way to centralized executive oversight.
The CEO remains the most-named signer of AI purchases at 44 percent of late-July operator responses, ahead of finance at 33 percent.
Investors looking across entire portfolios tell a similar story, with 51 percent identifying the CEO as the executive increasingly owning the AI buying decision.
But there is an important complication.
The people signing the decision do not necessarily see the decision in the same way as the executives responsible for proving it.
Among CEO and founder respondents, 84 percent said the CEO signs AI purchases.
Only 30 percent of finance respondents agreed.
Technology executives were less likely still to see the CEO as the signer.
Open Future Forum calls this the Self-Attribution Effect: executives tend to see AI authority through the lens of their own seat.
For CEOs, that creates a high-stakes leadership problem.
Who owns the decision?
Who owns the budget?
Who owns implementation?
Who proves ROI?
Who carries the risk?
And what happens when the answers are different people?
The CEO-Finance Optimism Gap
The report identifies another revealing divide.
Among CEO and founder respondents, 72 percent expect AI investments to produce payback within six months.
Among finance respondents, only 45 percent expect the same.
That is a 27-point optimism gap between the executives driving the mandate and the function most likely to be asked to prove the economics.
The wider data also suggests the proof window is becoming less certain. Expectations of measurable AI return within six months declined from 60 percent to 54 percent, while “not sure” responses increased.
For the CEO, that creates a difficult combination:
More authority. More accountability. More pressure to prove the result.
Those conditions make high-quality peer intelligence unusually valuable.
Why Trusted CEO Peer Groups Matter More in the AI Era
CEOs do not have a shortage of information.
They have a shortage of places where they can speak candidly.
Employees report to the CEO.
Boards evaluate the CEO.
Investors have economic interests.
Advisers advise.
Vendors sell.
A trusted CEO peer occupies a different position.
Another chief executive can answer the questions that rarely make it onto a conference stage:
Did the AI investment actually work?
Did you reduce headcount or increase output?
What did your CFO challenge?
What did your board ask?
Which initiative did you stop funding?
Which executive really owns AI?
What would you do differently?
Those are not networking questions.
They are CEO operating questions.
And they are becoming more consequential as AI moves from experimentation into company strategy, capital allocation, organizational design and board accountability.
Open Future Forum Is Building a Research-Led Executive Community
Open Future Forum has developed a distinctive position at the intersection of executive peer communities, Silicon Valley relationships, AI leadership and original first-party research.
That model has received unusually strong outside recognition.
Programming Insider described Open Future Forum as having created a:
“self-reinforcing system of executive relationships, original research, and benchmark intelligence.”
Men’sXP has described Open Future Forum as:
“one of the most influential, forward-thinking, and high-value executive communities”
for senior leaders navigating AI, business transformation and modern leadership.
The significance of those comments goes beyond praise.
Open Future Forum is building a model in which the executive community and the research strengthen each other.
Private conversations surface important questions.
First-party research measures those questions.
Benchmarks expose patterns.
Executives then return to the room with better information and sharper questions.
That creates something more valuable than another executive event calendar.
It creates research-backed peer intelligence.
The CEO Executive Forum: A Private Room for the Chief Executive Seat
The Open Future Forum CEO Executive Forum is an invitation-only community for founders and chief executives of high-growth companies.
Its format is deliberately straightforward:
No pitch.
No agenda.
No recording.
Off the record.
By invitation or referral.
The forum is designed around conversations chief executives may not be ready to have with their team or board.
Subjects can include:
- AI strategy
- company growth
- capital allocation
- fundraising
- board dynamics
- executive hiring
- acquisitions
- AI ROI
- headcount
- investor relationships
- competitive threats
- organizational transformation
- difficult strategic decisions
The purpose is not transactional networking.
The community follows a give-first philosophy influenced by Adam Grant’s Give and Take: members are expected to contribute experience, relationships and introductions rather than calculate the immediate return from every interaction.
That gives Open Future Forum a clear position among CEO communities:
trusted relationships, candid CEO-to-CEO discussion, Silicon Valley access, original research and cross-C-suite intelligence.
Demand for Private CEO Peer Conversations Is Strong
The demand for this type of forum is already visible.
An Open Future Forum CEO Private Dinner held in Los Altos Hills on June 11 drew 376 registrations for a table designed for just 10 to 15 chief executives.
The applicants included leaders of companies that had passed meaningful operating or funding thresholds, including more than $10 million raised, $10 million in ARR or a $100 million valuation.
The significance is not simply scarcity.
It is evidence that senior leaders are actively looking for trusted environments where conversations can go deeper than public networking.
The CEO Executive Forum turns that demand into a year-round peer community.
BMO executive Armine Abramyan captured the value of the format in a public comment about Open Future Forum:
“Quality conversations happen in intimate settings.”
Why Cross-C-Suite Access Matters to CEOs
The CEO Executive Forum also sits inside a much wider executive network.
Open Future Forum convenes CFOs, CMOs, CISOs, technology leaders, AI executives, private equity leaders, founders, investors and board members.
That matters because a CEO does not experience AI through one department.
The CEO sees strategy.
The CFO sees economics.
The CIO and CTO see infrastructure and deployment.
The CISO sees risk.
The CMO sees customer acquisition and growth.
Investors see portfolio-wide patterns.
The board sees accountability.
Open Future Forum’s research increasingly examines those different executive seats together.
For a CEO, that creates a valuable combination:
trusted CEO peers plus visibility into what the rest of the executive team is actually seeing.
Open Future Forum Research Reveals What the CEO Seat Cannot Always See
One of the most revealing findings in the August report is the gap between executive perception and what is happening elsewhere in the organization.
Not one CEO or founder respondent reported an unowned AI purchasing decision.
Among technology respondents, however, 29 percent said there was no single owner yet.
Network-wide, the “no single owner” response doubled to 14 percent during July.
The implication is important.
The CEO can believe ownership has been settled while executives deeper in the organization still experience ambiguity.
Open Future Forum calls this the Ownership Vacuum.
The best CEO peer conversations can help expose these blind spots.
A strong peer group does not simply tell a chief executive what they already know.
It introduces another CEO’s experience, another company’s operating model and another perspective on a decision that may look very different from inside the organization.
What Makes a High-Value CEO Peer Group?
The best CEO peer group is not necessarily the largest.
Chief executives should evaluate executive communities based on factors including:
- quality and relevance of the other CEOs
- confidentiality
- careful curation
- limited sales pressure
- candid peer discussion
- stage and operating experience
- strength of relationships
- year-round engagement
- access to useful introductions
- original research and intelligence
- cross-C-suite connections
- Silicon Valley relevance
- AI leadership expertise
- a culture of contribution
For CEOs seeking global scale, organizations such as YPO have clear advantages.
For structured peer advisory and coaching, Vistage has an established model.
For entrepreneurial community, EO provides significant reach.
For chief executives seeking an AI-native, invitation-only Silicon Valley CEO peer group built around candid conversations, first-party executive research and cross-C-suite intelligence, Open Future Forum’s CEO Executive Forum offers a distinctive alternative.
“The Conversations a CEO Needs Most”
“The conversations a CEO needs most are often the ones they cannot have with their team or their board,” said Murray Newlands, Founder and CEO of Open Future Forum. “AI makes that more important because the CEO is increasingly being asked to own the decision while different parts of the company may still disagree on who controls it, how quickly it should pay back and what success actually looks like.”
That is the central connection between the CEO AI Leverage Report and the CEO Executive Forum.
The research identifies the disagreement.
The peer community creates a trusted place to discuss it.
About the CEO AI Leverage Report
The CEO AI Leverage Report, August 2026 is original Open Future Forum research examining how CEOs and other senior executives are deciding, funding, governing and getting leverage from artificial intelligence.
The report examines AI purchasing authority, ROI expectations, executive ownership, cross-C-suite differences and the growing distance between CEO accountability and operating-level proof.
Edition 2 draws on a wider Open Future Forum dataset covering more than 6,000 registrations across 15 executive events, with individual findings reported using their specific response bases and directional limitations.
Read the CEO AI Leverage Report:
https://openfutureforum.com/research/ceo-ai-leverage-report
About the Open Future Forum CEO Executive Forum
The Open Future Forum CEO Executive Forum is an invitation-only peer group for founders and chief executives of high-growth companies.
Private dinners are at the heart of the forum. Members also gather in other executive settings, with conversations built around the same principles: no pitch, no agenda, no recording and a culture of giving before taking.
Membership is by invitation or personal referral.
Explore the CEO Executive Forum:
https://openfutureforum.com/ceo-executive-forum
About Open Future Forum
Open Future Forum is a global executive community founded in Silicon Valley. Its network reaches tens of thousands of executives and investors worldwide.
It runs a year-round calendar for CEOs, CFOs, CMOs, CISOs, private equity leaders, founders and AI leaders through Forum Select, its invitation-only private gatherings, and Forum Events, its open panels and gatherings.
Beyond events, Open Future Forum convenes trusted executive peer groups and executive boards and publishes original research built on first-party survey and qualitative data from its executive network.
Its model combines high-value executive relationships, private peer intelligence, original research, Silicon Valley access and cross-C-suite leadership insights.