Arrrrr! 🏴☠️ Welcome to a 🔒 subscriber-only edition 🔒 of Category Pirates. Each week, we share radically different ideas to help you design new and different categories. For more: Dive into an audiobook, listen to a category design jam session, or upgrade to a Founding subscription to ask the Pirate Eddie Bot your category design questions.
Dear Friend, Subscriber, and Category Pirate,
Walk into any boardroom today, and you’ll feel the quiet unease of leaders trying to make sense of artificial intelligence.
Most companies are racing to adopt AI.
But few are asking an important question: Who’s governing it?
If CEOs will soon manage more AI agents than employees, governance becomes the single most important capability a company can build.
Sue Barsamian helps businesses build toward that future.
Sue is one of Silicon Valley’s most respected board members.
She serves on the boards of Box, Five9, Gen Digital (formerly Symantec), and more. Earlier in her career, she worked with Pirate Christopher to pioneer the Lightning Strike strategy that reshaped how technology companies go to market. Today, she’s known as The Velvet Hammer—a leader who delivers extraordinary results while maintaining her humanity.
Sue has spent her career helping leaders turn complexity into clarity.
And an urgent challenge she’s seeing is how we choose to govern AI.
Too many boards treat AI like a quarterly agenda item.
It’s something to monitor, not master.
But when anyone in a company can create a ChatGPT account and spin up an agent that makes decisions, connects systems, and acts autonomously, the old governance model collapses. Oversight alone won’t protect a business.
What’s needed is a new category of literacy where every leader understands not only what AI can do, but how to direct it responsibly.
Governance can no longer be about saying “no.”
It must become the discipline of enabling “how.”
Sue believes the next generation of Category Kings won’t be those who adopt AI first. They’ll be the ones who govern it best.
At Box, for example, every employee is certified on AI. People are building agentic workflows, competing in hackathons, and automating everyday tasks across departments. HR won one of the internal competitions.
That didn’t happen by accident.
The company treats AI fluency the way it once treated financial fluency.
It’s a baseline skill for every role.
Beneath that initiative is a governance process modeled after software development. Every agent or workflow goes through its own lifecycle (proposed, reviewed, validated, and monitored) before it touches production data.
Committees are also evolving at the board level.
Sue says technology and cyber oversight are now discussed alongside audit and compensation. It reflects how strategic AI has become. It’s not a compliance exercise. It’s a system for continuous learning that lets the company innovate without losing control.
Innovation that scales because it’s governed, not in spite of it.
You can’t lead what you don’t understand, and AI is forcing every leader to adapt.
In a future where AI will handle more of the logic, leadership will be an art that requires more judgment, empathy, and connection.
It will be less about commanding tasks and more about compounding relationships.
Sue is an expert at striking a balance between the two.
Her teams call her The Velvet Hammer because she demands excellence, but she delivers it with empathy. The people she has mentored over decades still follow her because she knows that performance and trust are partners. Results without relationships don’t last.
In this conversation, you’ll discover:
How AI is redefining governance as a source of capability, and why it will decide which companies win in the agentic era
The inside story of how Sue’s boards are redesigning oversight for a world where bots outnumber employees, and how it changes what “risk” even means
How boards can evolve to see technology and cyber risk alongside financial risk
Why Lightning Strikes remain the organizing principle of category leaders, and how Sue helped co-create the legendary Lightning Strike strategy
What Sue has learned about leading with trust, rhythm, and responsibility
The companies that thrive in the agentic era won’t be defined by how much AI they deploy, but by how much human judgment they preserve. Boards will need to understand algorithms the way they once understood accounting. And every professional, regardless of title, will have to think like a technologist and act like a teacher.
This conversation is a call to every leader: AI alone won’t make your company legendary.
You must direct it with clarity, courage, and compassion.
(And enable your team to do the same.)
Arrrrrr,
Category Pirates 🏴☠️
P.S. – Want to unlock the entire jam session with Sue?
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