The most important AI decisions a CTO makes in 2026 are not written down anywhere. Build vs buy on the model layer. How to staff a Chief AI Officer org against the existing engineering function. Which evaluations the engineering team trusts and which it does not. What to tell the board about model risk without overstating either the risk or the mitigation.
Forum Select runs a CTO track for these conversations. Private invitation-only dinners in San Francisco and Palo Alto. 8 to 30 guests per dinner. No agenda printed on a card. Off the record always.
When does it make sense to build vs buy on foundation models, fine-tuned models, agentic tooling and the orchestration layer above it. The actual cost curves, not the press-release versions.
How to staff the AI organisation against the existing engineering function. Where Chief AI Officer roles work, where they fail, and how to design the reporting structure to avoid duplication.
The gap between what model evaluations report and what the engineering team trusts in production. Which evaluation frameworks have held up. Which have not.
How to communicate AI risk to a public-company board without overstating the risk, understating the mitigation, or creating a paper trail that does not match the actual situation.
What is actually working in production for agentic systems. Identity, authorisation, audit trails. Where the architecture is solved and where it remains an open problem.
The CTO track is for senior technical leaders at companies with significant AI exposure. Typical attendees:
The selection criterion is the same as the rest of Forum Select. Seniority is necessary. Generosity is more so. The unspoken rule is to lead with what you can give: share what you know about the technical decisions that worked or did not, make the introductions that matter, hold the off-the-record norm.
Some of the most useful Forum Select dinners are cross-suite by design. CTOs, CFOs and CISOs at the same table, working through the questions that cannot be answered inside any single function.
Examples of cross-suite themes:
No. The CTO track is open to senior technical leaders at any company with significant AI exposure, including enterprise CTOs leading AI transformation inside large non-AI companies.
Conferences are public, presentation-driven and on the record. Forum Select dinners are private, conversation-driven and off the record. The CTO conversations worth having most are the ones that cannot happen at a conference.
Yes. Every guest at the table is themselves a senior technical leader. There is no presentation layer, no panel format, no separation between speakers and audience.
YPO has a strong global peer-learning model but is not AI-specific. Forum Select is AI-native and Silicon Valley-based. For a full comparison, see the guide to the best AI executive communities.
The CTO track within Forum Select is invitation-only. The first step is to apply directly or attend a Forum Event in person.