Where family offices, CFOs and CEOs actually agree on AI: notes from exclusive private dinners
Over the past two years I’ve hosted a series of private events through Open Future Forum, with CEOs of $100M+ companies in one room, CFOs in another, and family office principals and board members in a third. Different rooms, different stakes. What I didn’t expect was how much the conversations have started to rhyme.
What I didn’t expect was how much the conversations have started to rhyme.
Back in 2023 the three groups were talking past each other. Now they’ve largely landed in the same place, even though they got there by different routes.
Agents, not chat. CEOs see them as the thing that finally changes operating leverage. One told me he expects half his back-office headcount to be supervising agents within 18 months. Nobody at the table pushed back. CFOs see the first AI investment with unit economics they can defend to a board. Family offices see the infrastructure layer where new categories get built.
Identity and governance is the bottleneck. CISOs raised it first. Now CFOs are asking the same question about audit trails, and family offices are funding the answer. When operators, finance leaders and capital allocators independently land on the same chokepoint, something usually gets built.
Headcount has become strategic. CEOs are redesigning org charts around senior hires and compressed middles. CFOs bring a reorg scenario to every planning cycle whether they intend to execute on it or not. Family offices are repricing services businesses on the same logic. Nobody I talk to thinks the reorg is optional. The argument is over timing.
Trust is the new moat. When intelligence gets cheap, what compounds is relationships. CEOs talk about distribution, CFOs about retention, family offices about deal flow. They’re describing the same thing. It’s also why these dinners keep filling up. Conferences are a poor vehicle for that kind of trust. LinkedIn is worse. Twelve people around a table, off the record, is starting to look like the right one.
The most useful AI conversations I’ve sat in this year have actually been about organisational design, capital allocation, and who you want in the room when you figure the rest out.
Murray Newlands is a Partner at IA Seed Ventures, Partner at Tilden Family Office Group, and founder of Open Future Forum. Subscribe at substack.com/@murraynewlands.
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The convergence on identity and governance as the shared bottleneck is the most telling signal in this piece. In 2023 these three groups were having entirely different conversations — now they've landed on the same chokepoint. But I'd push back gently on one thing: alignment in language doesn't always mean alignment in understanding. When CEOs talk about governance and family offices talk about governance, are they describing the same problem? The real test won't be at the dinner table — it'll be in how each group defines accountability when an AI agent makes a costly mistake.