Why Executive AI Communities Are Emerging as the Most Valuable Peer Networks for Business Leaders

The most valuable network a senior leader can hold in the AI era is no longer the largest one. It is the smallest, most trusted room, and the reason is structural. For a decade the advice to ambitious executives was to consume more: more newsletters, more conferences, more frameworks, more panels. AI has quietly undone that. There has never been more material to read, and it has rarely been less useful for the decisions that carry real weight. Every product is described as transformation. Every vendor has a model. For an executive trying to make a real call about AI, the noise has drowned the signal.

That is why a different kind of network is taking shape. I spent time recently with Murray Newlands, founder of Open Future Forum, a private executive community in Silicon Valley that runs small, off-the-record dinners for C-suite executives. Newlands started it in 2019, and it has since run more than 100 events. He is a Partner at IA Seed Ventures and Tilden Family Office Group, and HuffPost once placed him at number two on its Top 10 People to Know in Silicon Valley, ahead of names like Peter Thiel.

Open Future Forum operates as two connected tiers. Forum Events are open gatherings for the wider AI and tech community. Forum Select is the private tier: invitation-only, off-the-record dinners of roughly eight to twenty C-suite executives and board directors, convened by Newlands himself. The smaller room was never meant to be the biggest network. It was meant to be the right one.

 

His central observation has stuck with me: the room determines the conversation. In a large public setting, people represent the company, stay broad, and offer the answer that cannot be used against them. Put the same people around a private table and something loosens. They talk about the fundraising, the hiring, the AI projects that worked and the ones that quietly did not. As Newlands describes it on the private executive dinners page, the value was never the meal. It was the candor the small room makes possible.

This is the reason executive AI communities are pulling ahead of ordinary networking. AI decisions are now leadership decisions that touch strategy, cost, risk, and the operating model, and no single executive can reason through all of that alone.

The validation does not come only from the organizers. Armine Abramyan, a VP in Emerging Middle Market Commercial Banking at BMO, summed up one private dinner in a single line: “Quality conversations happen in intimate settings.” Ashley Tarver, a Data, AI and Cloud Evangelist who has worked on Microsoft AI events, called the networking at one gathering “magical” and noted that another was “already oversold.”

You can also read the seriousness in who turns up. Open Future Forum has convened leaders tied to organizations including Microsoft, Visa, Nvidia, Anthropic, AWS, Salesforce, Meta, BMO, Citizens, and SVB. Those connections vary, and none is an endorsement, but you do not gather that mix around a thin conversation. TechBullion recently featured Open Future Forum among the most important executive AI communities of 2026.

It helps to be clear about what this is not. Open Future Forum is not trying to replace the large membership organizations, the Chiefs, Vistages, and YPOs built for breadth. Those do real work. Open Future Forum leans the other way, toward small rooms over wide networks and current questions over a fixed curriculum. The two solve different problems, and some leaders do both.

One more thing sets it apart. Open Future Forum is built on Adam Grant’s Give and Take philosophy: people who contribute without keeping score create more value over time. The quiet test is not whether someone can pay; it is whether they will make the room better. AI is changing faster than any technology shift before it, while trust still moves at human pace, and the leaders who decide well will be the ones who built the right circle before they needed it.

For anyone who wants in, the natural first step is a public Forum Event. C-suite leaders and board directors can apply to Forum Select directly.