Peter Zemsky

Professor of Strategy and Innovation @ INSEAD

& CEO @ Lexarius

Peter Zemsky is the Eli Lilly Chaired Professor of Strategy and Innovation at INSEAD and a leading voice on how organisations compete and win in an AI-driven economy. He is a recognised authority on strategy and innovation, and on how organisations translate digital and AI technologies into sustained business value. He directs INSEAD’s online programmes on Strategy for Digital and AI Disruption and Strategy for Aspiring Chief Strategy Officers.

He combines academic leadership with extensive executive experience. From 2013 to 2023, he served as INSEAD’s Deputy Dean and Dean of Innovation, overseeing core activities including degree programmes, executive education, faculty and research, and fundraising. During this period, he led a wide-ranging innovation agenda, spanning immersive learning technologies, large-scale digital education, and the creation of INSEAD’s San Francisco Hub for Business Innovation.

He is currently the founding CEO of Lexarius, INSEAD’s conversational AI venture, where he works with organisations and thought leaders to develop advanced AI role-plays that build transformation capabilities, accelerate leadership development, and support large-scale change initiatives.

Professor Zemsky holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and a PhD from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Strategic Leadership in an AI Economy

The shift to an AI-first economy is accelerating rapidly fueled by unprecedented investment, intensifying geopolitical competition, and the transformative potential of the technology itself.
This shift is not just technological; it is fundamentally reshaping how organizations compete, forcing leaders to rethink market dynamics, their winning value propositions, and the design of their organizations.
The central challenge is not simply adopting AI, but developing leaders who can integrate deep managerial expertise with a genuine understanding of AI’s capabilities and limitations.
As the pace and uncertainty of strategy increase, the most effective leaders will be those who anchor their decisions in enduring principles of value creation and value capture – using these as a compass in an increasingly complex landscape.