Michael Amori is CEO and cofounder of Virtualitics. A data scientist and entrepreneur with a background in finance and physics.
As CEO of a leading defense technology company, I’ve seen firsthand how AI is redefining both national security strategy and enterprise competitiveness. In an industry where innovation cycles are measured in months and decision precision defines success, AI has become indispensable—enabling leaders to act faster, scale smarter and maintain global readiness.
That same leadership mindset—using intelligence as both a strategic asset and a safeguard—now extends far beyond defense. Across every sector, AI is becoming the foundation for how CEOs navigate disruption and drive growth in an increasingly complex world.
AI is now the new language of leadership decision making. It’s what empowers executives to innovate with speed, scale with confidence and operate globally with resilience.
That principle also underpins America’s AI Action Plan, which the White House released in July 2025. On the surface, it’s a federal framework for responsible innovation and technological leadership. However, a closer look reveals something more—a blueprint for how today’s business leaders can architect their own organizations for the future.
Just as the U.S. aims to lead through the three pillars of innovation, infrastructure and diplomacy, CEOs can apply those same levers to build agility, resilience and trust into their operations. Here’s how:
1. Embrace Fast Innovation
The first pillar, “Accelerate AI Innovation,” calls for deregulation and private sector leadership. For business leaders, that means embracing AI as both a multiplier and a moat.
The companies that integrate AI deeply into their value chain—training data models unique to their operations, embedding decision intelligence into their planning and empowering employees with AI copilots and agents—will outcompete those waiting to buy into the technology.
Part of this evolution also means putting the right controls in place so that AI becomes a resource rather than a risk. Guardrails don’t constrain innovation; they enable it. They establish a framework of safety and accountability, allowing more people in the organization to leverage it in their daily workflows.
2. Own Your Digital Infrastructure
The second pillar, “Build American AI Infrastructure,” centers on the nation’s physical backbone of digital leadership—semiconductors, data centers and secure data pipelines.
For CEOs, this translates into a clear goal: Own your infrastructure narrative. This doesn’t necessarily mean building your own data centers, but it does mean understanding where your models live, how your data flows and who controls your computing power.
Companies that treat their digital infrastructure as strategic capital will scale more efficiently and securely. Whether you’re modernizing a legacy operation or expanding into new markets, the ability to process, protect and deploy AI solutions faster than competitors will determine your growth trajectory.
3. Lead With Diplomacy
The third pillar, “Lead in International AI Diplomacy and Security,” reframes AI as an instrument of global influence and trade.
For multinational organizations, this means corporate supply chains, cloud regions and data-sharing agreements are now part of bigger geopolitical decision making. Executives should see this as an opportunity to lead with transparency and trust.
Building explainability, bias monitoring and ethical governance into your AI systems is no longer just about compliance—it’s also about maintaining positive brand equity.
Build Your Executive AI Action Plan
What’s striking about the national AI strategy is how much it mirrors the private sector’s own evolution—data literacy as a strategic advantage, explainability as a trust mechanism and decision intelligence as a bridge between leadership intent and operational reality.
To implement these new best practices into your strategic agenda, try these three things:
1. Treat your AI strategy like a national agenda.
Setting AI priorities is a company-wide mandate. At Virtualitics, we operationalized this by creating cross-functional AI task forces that bring together operations, IT and finance. These teams ensure that every strategic partnership and internal initiative aligns with long-term company goals, not just immediate product needs.
For instance, when onboarding a large strategic partner, our task forces map objectives across functions, assign responsibilities and run scenarios together to anticipate operational challenges. By treating AI adoption as a coordinated, long-horizon effort, we can embed intelligence into every decision—creating alignment across teams and scaling impact more efficiently.
2. Invest in infrastructure resilience.
Your ability to generate insight will increasingly depend on evolving your digital supply chain. This is why we’ve invested in flexible, high-performance infrastructure that can scale with demand and evolve with new AI models.
This approach ensures we’re never locked into a single provider or environment, giving our teams the agility to pivot quickly, experiment safely and extract actionable insights in real time. By building infrastructure resilience internally, we can turn our computing and data ecosystems into a competitive advantage rather than potential bottlenecks.
3. Build with trust at the foundation.
Whether through supply chains, data partnerships or AI ethics alliances, align your brand with trusted ecosystems. Our partnership in Palantir’s FedStart Program has allowed us to build secure, compliant systems while demonstrating our credibility and reliability to clients and regulators alike.
Trust also shapes our data partnerships and AI ethics standards, ensuring that every deployment adheres to high governance and explainability benchmarks. By prioritizing alignment over speed alone, we can mitigate business risk while strengthening our reputation—turning trust from a compliance checkbox into a foundation for strategic growth.
The Future Is Intelligent Leadership
The U.S. government’s AI strategy signals what forward-thinking CEOs already know: Leadership in the AI era demands vision, speed and commitment to change.
The same principles guiding America’s national plan—innovate fast, build strong and lead responsibly—are the ones every business must adopt to stay ahead. The future will belong to those who can turn intelligence into advantage at every level of their organization.
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