Sapeum CEO Kut Akdogan joined Ben Brooks on The Lift to talk about how leaders set direction when the ground under them keeps moving. The full conversation is below.
Uncertainty needs a destination, not a forecast
Uncertainty has a reputation problem. It gets read as a lack of grip, when for most organizations it is simply the operating condition. The argument in the episode is that good strategy does not remove uncertainty. It anchors it. Crossing an ocean is uncertain either way, but a storm means something different when you know which shore you are heading for. Without that fixed point, the same conditions read as drifting.
Bold goals, taken in small steps
Rigid multi-year plans assume a stability that is not there. The answer is not less ambition, it is a different cadence: a long-range objective that does not move, approached through steps small enough to test. Complexity gets earned rather than assumed. Take one bite, learn from it, and the next bite can be larger.
Treat AI as a tool, not a transformation
Kut's view of AI is unglamorous in a useful way. Stripped of the mythology it is technology that needs grounded implementation against a specific problem. The projects that work start small, solve something real, and scale from there. The ones that stall try to transform an organization in a single move. Treating AI adoption as process improvement rather than magic is most of the difference.
Where this meets what we build
Most of what makes a company uncertain about itself has nothing to do with the market. It is that the processes the business runs on live in people's heads, undocumented and unobserved, so nobody can say with confidence how the work actually happens today.
That is the part Sapeum addresses. It captures the workflows and the judgment calls people carry unwritten, and turns them into structured, observable data: process maps you can query and measure, and simulate against before committing to a change. None of that makes the future predictable. It does mean the part you already own stops being a guess.
