Building what’s next: How B.C. CEOs can lead in an age of change

From AI to climate change, here’s how B.C. business leaders can stay ahead of change and build lasting resilience.

Caroline Stokes is a leadership strategist, executive coach, and author of AfterShock to 2030: A CEO’s Guide to Reinvention in the Age of AI, Climate, and Societal Collapse (Broad Book Press, 2025.) Based in Vancouver, she works with people in governance, Fortune 500 companies, and critical infrastructure leaders to close generational, cultural, and systemic divides and move individuals, teams, companies, and industries forward.

The Greater Vancouver Board of Trade recently warned that B.C.’s fiscal future looks “bleak”. But warning alone is not a strategy. In today’s environment of constant disruption, CEOs don’t need another reminder that things are fragile—they need a roadmap to reinvention.

The World Economic Forum’s Chief Economists’ Outlook (September 2025) suggests a more muted growth outlook for advanced economies. Philipp Grosskurth, Insight Lead at the WEF, explained that the global economy is being reshaped by trade disputes, geopolitical fragmentation, AI, and the climate crisis. He called these disruptions “shocks”. Crucially, he normalized them: shocks are not temporary storms, but the new operating conditions that leaders must learn to navigate.

Hoping for growth and future stability—without investing in what the WEF calls growth drivers—human capital development, technology, innovation, and ecosystem resilience—is a recipe for stagnation.

From warning to action

Since the pandemic, many B.C. businesses have adapted. Hybrid and distributed work models have become common. Supply chains have been re-engineered over and over in light of tariff changes. Customer engagement has shifted to digital channels. But these changes, while necessary, only scratch the surface and become a distraction to the true challenge of our time.

The deeper question is: what will it take for B.C.’s leaders to evolve faster and adapt in this new era instead of lamenting the hypernormalization of bleakness? Reinvention is not about tinkering with operations for quarterly relief. It requires CEOs to re-examine their mindset and long-term role in a world defined by:

  • Geopolitical fracture: Trade volatility can disrupt organizations of every size overnight, rippling through the local economy, prosperity, and even community morale. The result: burnout, short-termism, insecurity, and a collapse of creativity and optimism to build the future.
  • Technological acceleration: AI adoption creates both opportunities and ethical dilemmas, sparking ROI debates while fear of adoption stalls progress. Leaders must push beyond rhetoric and commit to action or risk falling behind.
  • Climate disruption: Risk is already costing billions in lost infrastructure, housing, and insurance coverage, putting resilience squarely on the balance sheet.
  • Leadership transformation: Organizations require not only operational agility, but leaders who can cultivate clarity, systems level emotional intelligence, and full-scale systems thinking to understand all variables and steer through uncertainty.

AI is an accelerant and a divider

AI deserves its own place in the leadership conversation because it is both an accelerant of progress and a divider between those who reinvent and those who fall behind.

Consider Accenture: the consulting giant is training all 700,000+ of its employees in agentic AI to meet surging client demand. CEO Julie Sweet has been clear that companies must focus on three workforce priorities—upskilling, talent rotation, and efficiencies—if they want AI to translate into real business outcomes.

This kind of coherence reflects what I call “agentic holism” in my book AfterShock to 2030: the recognition that AI cannot be bolted on in isolation. It must be embedded across the organization’s culture, strategy, and systems in sync with climate resilience and human capital development. Agentic holism means leaders stop treating AI as a side project and start treating it as part of a synthetic and human operating system that will find business solutions that matter for customers and employees.

Across B.C., however, adoption has been uneven. Some companies run isolated AI pilots in IT or marketing. Others stall, locked in fear about ROI or compliance. The risk is fragmentation: small pockets of experimentation, while the rest of the organization stays frozen. That creates silos of speed and silos of paralysis.

At the same time, AI-native firms—startups born in this era or fast-adapting technology organizations like NVIDIA—are already operating at a different pace. They build business models that assume automation, continuous learning, and scale without bureaucracy. For traditional organizations, this can be an existential threat: they will not be outworked but outpaced.

The leadership challenge is coherence. AI adoption and training must happen at the same rhythm across the organization—from the boardroom to frontline staff. When everyone has a baseline understanding, companies can experiment responsibly, innovate faster, and avoid shadow AI practices that can derail momentum. Shadow AI happens when employees use unapproved tools without guidance going beyond security or compliance which can create a culture split between overuse and paralysis. As with Accenture, the only way forward for CEOs is to establish clear governance and company-wide training and cultural norms around AI adaptation and evolution to avoid fragmentation.

In B.C., this pressure is visible. Vancouver is home to globally recognized AI ventures like Sanctuary AI (pioneering general-purpose humanoid robotics), Borealis AI (RBC’s research institute), and a thriving gaming and film sector that is already integrating generative AI into production pipelines. But outside of these clusters, many small and mid-sized businesses are struggling to move beyond spreadsheets and pilot projects. The talent gap is widening and so is the cultural divide between early adopters and the hesitant majority.

The question B.C. CEOs must ask is not whether to adopt AI—but how to embed it into culture, governance, and strategy at scale.

Climate risk is already a balance-sheet issue

AI may be new, but climate risk has already proven costly. The 2021 climate-related disasters alone cost the province C$10.6 to C$17.1 billion, equivalent to 3–5% of B.C.’s GDP. The B.C. Financial Services Authority now classifies natural catastrophes as “material and potentially systemic risks”. Insurance losses tied to wildfires, floods, and extreme weather in Canada shattered records in 2024, totalling C$8.5 billion.

For CEOs, the lesson is clear: climate risk is business risk. It touches supply chains, operating costs, workforce resilience, and brand reputation. Pretending it belongs only in CSR reports is no longer an option. Every decision, every operational habit, directly relates to net-zero outcomes. Without working systems from the inside out, resilience will deteriorate—and with it, long-term competitiveness.

Ecosystems mean more than tech clusters

Grosskurth’s call for “ecosystem development” deserves amplification. Too often, the term is reduced to business clusters or tech hubs. But ecosystems also mean environmental systems—forests, watersheds, coastlines.

If companies don’t contribute to climate resilience, the shocks will only intensify, undermining the very populations they depend on: employees, customers, and supply chains. This is where B.C. CEOs must shift from defensive adaptation to proactive reinvention.

That means:

  • Investing in resilience-focused innovation. You’ll read ESG leaders talking about “trade-offs”—a polite, policy-way of saying “there are costs, compromises, and sacrifices we’ve avoided naming.” Leaders must be honest about those costs, not gloss over them.
  • Redesigning supply chains for durability, not just cost. Sourcing “cheaper” from elsewhere might balance a quarterly sheet, but it inflates carbon footprints, weakens local ecosystems, and undermines long-term resilience.
  • Embedding resilience metrics alongside financial ones. Profit cannot be the only scoreboard. Resilience must be tracked, measured, and rewarded. Expect shareholders to change their language first.

What defines a future-ready CEO 

The leaders who thrive between now and 2030 will not be those using tradition-based language and metrics. They will be the ones who reinvent across three dimensions:

  • Narrative clarity: Being able to articulate why their organization matters in a disrupted world. Regardless of governance expectations, customers, employees, and shareholders will demand this clarity. A CEO who cannot explain how AI and climate impact their strategic decisions and mission will eventually be labelled “not future fit”.
  • Human capital investment: Elevating emotional intelligence, creativity, and adaptability alongside technical skill. This means workforce-wide AI literacy programs, coaching, and building cultures that reward curiosity rather than compliance.
  • Systemic reinvention: Treating climate, AI, and geopolitics not as threats to avoid, but as forces to design around. For example, the “Catalyst–Citizen” model I explore in AfterShock to 2030 highlights leaders who can move both vertically and horizontally through systems, bridging stakeholders, sectors, and timelines.

This is the foundation of what I call Fifth Industrial Revolution leadership: leaders who integrate AI, climate, and societal pressures into a new operating system. A reinvention. At its core is the understanding that the economy and the environment are not separate. Neither are human wellbeing and organizational performance.

A playbook for B.C. CEOs

Warnings may dominate headlines, but B.C. CEOs need more than caution. Their employees, customers, shareholders and stakeholders deserve action.

Here are five moves B.C. CEOs can make right now:

  1. Build an AI Adoption Roadmap: If you’re AI avoidant or only AI curious, prepare to level up. If you’re cautious about the ROI of AI, stop running isolated pilots. Align AI experiments, governance, and training across your entire organization so every function moves at the same rhythm.
  2. Invest in Workforce AI + EI Literacy: Pair technical training with emotional intelligence development. Employees need to know how AI will impact their role, and leaders must show they can guide with empathy.
  3. Localize for Resilience: Redesign supply chains and partnerships for durability, not just cost savings. Think carbon footprint, regional ecosystems, and long-term insurance risk.
  4. Measure Resilience as a KPI: Track climate readiness, workforce adaptability, and tech integration alongside profit. If you can’t measure resilience, you won’t manage it.
  5. Hire a Systems Coach: Polycrises don’t solve themselves. A systems coach helps CEOs and boards integrate climate, AI, and societal shifts into a single operating model—preventing leaders from being blindsided by the very shocks reshaping their future.

When institutions issue bleak forecasts, the natural response is caution. But caution without ambition leads to paralysis. Leaders who wait for clarity, stability, or perfect conditions will be too late.

For B.C. CEOs, reinvention is not a side project; it is the defining mandate of this decade. That means leaning into emotional intelligence, narrative clarity, systemic foresight, and modular action.

Yes, collapse is already visible in many areas—societal breakdown, escalating climate damage, disrupted work and economic systems. But this is also the opportunity: to reinvent. Stagnation is the true inevitability if leaders cling to outdated models. Reinvention, on the other hand, unlocks resilience, relevance, and long-term prosperity. What do you choose?

Caroline Stokes