“IBCircle is a rare kind of room, full of leaders who show up to think out loud together instead of trading business cards. The June 3 conversation went right at the question every executive is wrestling with right now: how do you make good decisions when the rules keep changing? Put your data and AI to work, and build growth that compounds through the disruption. That is what a great think tank does, and I was glad to be part of it.” — Matt Frary, President & COO, XPFlow
Sixty CEOs and CFOs in a room. One moderator. Two speakers. And a question with no tidy answer: how do you make good decisions when the ground keeps moving?
That was IBCircle‘s June 3 roundup in Denver. Our President and COO, Matt Frary, sat on the panel alongside Richard Lackey of World Food Bank and Trade Oracle Group, moderated by Wipfli‘s Magnolia Movido.
Matt asked the room three questions. How many are experimenting with AI? Most hands. How many have built an agent? Fewer. How many have built one agent end to end, solved one specific problem, and proven the ROI before moving to the next? Almost none.
We’ve seen that gap before. Not in a conference room, in the field. A partner program’s problems rarely look like a strategy problem on paper. They look like a nobody-actually-looked problem. Licenses get bought, access gets distributed, credits disappear on things nobody tied to an outcome.
The fix isn’t more tooling. It’s an honest diagnostic first, then one proof of value before you scale anything. We’ve built revenue engines through every era of the internet. That pattern doesn’t change just because the tool is new.
One more thing worth repeating from the room: sensitive company data flowing into public AI models that retain what they’re given is real exposure, not hypothetical. It deserves a policy, not a shrug.
IBCircle’s report distills the evening into five takeaways, five strategic priorities, and five 90-day actions, including a data audit, a private-versus-public AI policy, and the challenge to pick one process and prove one agent before touching the next.
Download it free from IBCircle. https://www.ibcircle.com/ibcircle-report-june-3-2026-event
Grateful to Wipfli for hosting, and to IBCircle for getting the right people talking honestly instead of politely.
