At Fortune's COO Summit, Rakuten International COO Adrienne Down Coulson and Instacart operations head Tom Maguire described a fatigue settling over the executives who keep grocery and retail delivery running smoothly, with Down Coulson naming it “reinvention exhaustion.” The leaders now asked to remake their companies around AI are the same ones who ran them through restructurings, COVID, and geopolitical shocks with no time to recover, and AI raises a harder question about whether their hard-won skills still matter at all. She admitted to being a longtime “absorber of friction” for her peers, a habit she says hides problems rather than fixing them. Both argued the fix is wholesale transformation over endless tweaks, with Down Coulson contending the siloed C-suite model itself needs a rebuild for a technology that cuts across every function at once.
