DETROIT — Chief operating officers from Nike, Sysco, Thomson Reuters, and Box gathered for a lunch roundtable at the Fortune COO Summit in Detroit to discuss the 'automation illusion' and the real-world challenges of adopting artificial intelligence in large enterprises. The session, hosted by Thomson Reuters, focused on balancing speed with clarity, accuracy, and human oversight as companies integrate AI into core operations.
Aayush Bhatnagar, Chief Operating Officer of Sysco, said the goal of AI was to take tribal knowledge embedded in long-standing human relationships and institutionalize it at scale. He added seven AI agents to his direct reports just four weeks before the summit. These agents—named and assigned specific roles such as escalation, delivery, and communications—are evaluated alongside human employees in his weekly business reviews. "I lost some sleep that night, thinking that our traditional laws of leadership, principles of leadership, do not apply to these agentic agents," Bhatnagar said. He also asked, "How do I train my managers now?" Bhatnagar added, "Every piece of broccoli you’re eating has moved an average of 2,000 miles."
Laura Clayton McDonnell, president of corporates at Thomson Reuters, emphasized that speed must not compromise reliability. "We’re going to move fast, we’re going to get these answers really quickly. But what about making sure that output is reliable, it’s accurate, it’s something that you can drive your business on?" she said. She added, "You cannot be wrong. You just can’t be wrong." Clayton McDonnell stressed that the human in the loop is structural, not optional, because no existing tool can exercise business judgment.
Olivia Nottebohm, COO of Box, noted that despite her company selling AI products and using Box AI internally, employee adoption has been lower than expected—not due to resistance, but confusion stemming from a lack of necessary skills. "Really making sure that people don’t feel disenfranchised, I think that has been the thing that took me the longest to figure out," she said. "I should have figured it out sooner." Box now runs mandatory AI training through its "No Boxer Left Behind" program and does not allow employees to opt out of the company’s AI transformation.
Other supporting initiatives discussed included Nike’s peer-curated internal learning platform, which has delivered 20,000 digital courses and 3,000 live sessions in the past year, and Sysco’s use of AI to reshape forecasting and procurement. Thomson Reuters is deploying AI to help lawyers, tax accountants, and trade professionals work faster while maintaining precision.