# AI Leadership — COTRUGLI > AI Leadership is the thought-leadership part of COTRUGLI's AI lab (cotrugli.tech): the cases, the record and the people of CDayZ 2026, held in Zadar, Croatia, 5–9 October 2026, by COTRUGLI Business School with SOIS, AI and Gaming EDIH, HashNET, the University of Zadar and Terešak Law Office, in partnership with the European Commission. Every case is a chapter of Codex Mercatorum, the public book; the full text of this site is at /llms-full.txt. ## Pages - [The cases](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/cases/): 59 cases with their opening lines, grouped by day and kind - [The record of CDayZ 2026](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/program/): every session as it ran, with its lead and table - [The people](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/speakers/): the 127 leaders and participants who were there - [Chronicles](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/chronicles/): essays and interviews - [The Zadar Declaration](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/declaration/): Human Leadership, Trusted AI and Fair Global Trade - [Codex Mercatorum](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/): the book, each case in full ## Cases - [The Gold Medal the Model Did Not Win](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/02.html): Sara Beram won a gold medal at the Mediterranean Games. Behind that moment were years of training, coaching, mental preparation, discipline, and continuous analysis of her performance. AI also became - [CEO Fire Chat](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/03.html): - [Why Smart People Still Produce Weak Decisions](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/04.html): The meeting began on time, which made it look disciplined. The agenda was clear. The slides had been sent the evening before. Finance had prepared numbers. Sales had brought market signals. HR had emp - [Imagine Robots in Business Three Years from Now](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/05.html): Imagine a warehouse in 2029. It is highly automated. Robots move goods, AI analyses operations, and different technology providers manage different parts of the process. At 2:17 in the morning, two ro - [From Lex Mercatoria to the AI Economy](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/06.html): Imagine two companies doing business across borders. AI agents help exchange offers, specifications, and delivery details. The buyer sends an updated specification. The supplier’s AI agent acknowledge - [The Season Was Full, but the Destination Wanted More](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/07.html): Imagine you are a hotel owner after a successful summer season. The hotel is full, guests are happy, and one guest asks: “We would love to come back in November. Could someone organise the whole stay - [75% Data Problem, €250 Billion Opportunity, Fog, Solution](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/08.html): Europe is facing a major digital challenge. By 2030, the EU wants 75% of European businesses to use cloud-edge technologies. At the same time, more than 70% of Europe’s cloud market is currently serve - [The Sale That Happened Before the Meeting](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/09.html): Imagine a sales director preparing for the most important meeting of the quarter. Twenty-four slides. Product demonstrations. Customer references. Seven minutes into the meeting, the customer interrup - [The First Monday as CEO](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/10.html): Imagine it is your first Monday as CEO. On Friday everyone congratulated you. By Monday morning, everyone needs something. Pricing approval. Cost decisions. HR issues. Board questions. Suppliers calli - [The Executive Who Built Twice](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/11.html): For years, we treated executive leadership and entrepreneurship as opposite career paths. One represents governance, responsibility, and organisations. The other represents ownership, speed, and risk. - [Problem, Solution. All the Rest Is Noise](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/12.html): Imagine a company where most meetings last ten minutes. The person responsible states the problem in one sentence. The team considers no more than three options. A decision is made, ownership is assig - [The AI Everyone Used but Underperformed](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/13.html): Imagine a company where almost everyone already uses AI. Sales writes proposals faster. Marketing creates more content. Finance analyses data instantly. Managers arrive with polished presentations. Ev - [AI Office](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/14.html): Imagine a company where employees have been experimenting with AI individually for months. Some use it for research. Others draft emails or automate routine tasks. One five-person team decides to rede - [The Best Person for the Old Job Was Ready for the New One](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/15.html): Imagine an employee everyone calls when something goes wrong. For twelve years, Martin has become indispensable. He knows customers, systems, exceptions, and difficult situations better than anyone el - [The Board Pack Was Perfect. The Decision Was Not.](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/16.html): Imagine a board considering the acquisition of a successful competitor. Everything looks convincing. Strong customers. Excellent financial model. Promising synergies. AI has helped analyse documents a - [The Rail That Never Decides](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/17.html): Imagine your largest customer suddenly withholds €62,400 from an invoice. They claim your delivery was late and your product failed to meet specification. Your company disagrees. Normally this would b - [The Hackathon Where Nobody Wrote Code](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/18.html): Imagine a traditional manufacturing company invited to an AI hackathon. The sales director laughs. “We have no developers. What are we going to hack?” But nobody writes code. Each company provides onl - [The Job Nobody Could Hire For](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/19.html): The eighth candidate withdrew on a Thursday. The founder read the recruiter’s message twice. “She likes the company and the team. Her concern is the scope of the role.” The position had been open for - [The European Company That Finally Raised Its Ambition](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/20.html): The invitation arrived through a customer they already served. A European industrial group was preparing a common operating programme across several countries. Its procurement team wanted to know whet - [The Meeting Where Everyone Was Right and Nothing Moved](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/21.html): At 11:47, the CEO realised they were having the same meeting for the fourth time. The slides were new. The arguments were familiar. The commercial director wanted to enter a neighbouring market while - [The Customers Who Stopped Buying and Started Belonging](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/22.html): The founder arrived at her own customer event and found that nobody needed her to open it. At one table, an experienced customer was helping a newcomer adapt a template. Across the room, two people co - [Do You Need a Tribe in the NEO Era?](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/23.html): Think about the people you studied or worked with during the most intense period of your career. You saw each other under pressure. You worked late. You disagreed. You watched each other solve difficu - [The Trip They Still Talked About Years Later](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/24.html): Five years after a learning journey, someone posts an old photograph. Within minutes, people begin remembering conversations rather than presentations. Getting lost on the way to a meeting. Dinner dis - [The Zadar Declaration and the Closing Session](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/25.html): For more than twenty years, COTRUGLI has worked with thousands of executives, entrepreneurs, and leaders. Over time, certain patterns become visible. The most successful people are not always the smar - [The Infrastructure That Changed Sides](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/26.html): The disaster-recovery plan was excellent. It had been audited twice. It failed in an afternoon — not because anything in it broke, but because the world it assumed stopped existing. - [The Invoice Nobody Wanted to Send](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/27.html): The invoice had been ready for eleven days. Nobody had sent it. He found it on a Monday, in the shared folder, numbered and complete: the second milestone on a custom test line for a large manufacture - [The Deadline That Was Not the Clock](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/28.html): --- The deadline arrived before the offer did. On a Tuesday morning the CEO of a precision-components manufacturer in a small Central European country — 340 people, one plant, a reputation built over - [The Night the Titles Came Off](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/29.html): At half past ten, the regional CEO was helping move a table. An entrepreneur held the other end. A younger manager cleared a path while someone rescued three glasses from the edge. They had spent the - [Learning Together, Building Together — Stronger Together](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/30.html): At the end of the first module, they compared notes on the journey home. They had listened to the same faculty, discussed the same case and spent the weekend with the same generation. Their notebooks - [Three Titles Arrived Before the Job Did](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/31.html): Marta had three proposals on her desk and one MBA diploma on the wall behind her. Lamora offered a Chief Transformation Navigator, two Navigators and a Navigation Analyst. Beutiful offered a Head of A - [The Sky Had No Border. The Data Did.](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/32.html): In 2031, the distance between Shenzhen and Hong Kong had not changed. The meaning of that distance had. Thousands of autonomous aircraft now moved through the low-altitude layer above the Greater Bay - [AI for Security and Business](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/33.html): Imagine you are the CEO of a family-owned food company during the most important week of the year. For six weeks, an attacker has quietly been inside your company. It began with a convincing supplier - [Sales Owned the Result. No One Owned the Whole.](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/34.html): At the end of a business-process review, the CEO heard two competing explanations for the same commercial problem. The process consultant's diagnosis was direct: the problem did not sit in sales alone - [Who Should Own the Intelligence?](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/35.html): We have already launched an AI-powered platform designed to help smallholder farmers turn raw farm data into actionable insights. The platform collects information from farmers about their farms, crop - [Who Owns the AI?](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/36.html): On Monday morning, Elena received what looked like a simple request. Her organisation had been asked to prepare an inventory of the artificial intelligence systems it used: the name of each system, it - [The Hour Before the Decision](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/37.html): The exercise begins at 04:40, and the first thing that fails is not a machine. Twenty-two people are in the room: eleven officers on a command course and eleven executives who were invited because the - [Before You Enter the Room](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/38.html): A few months ago, our organization was considering how best to structure a managed services organization supporting customers across multiple countries and regions. At a high level, there were two com - [The Leader the Operation Could Not Afford to Lose](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/39.html): The operation was finally stable. That was when he started to think he had created a new problem. At one point in his career he had taken responsibility for a high-volume operation run by a large inte - [Nobody Changed on Monday](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/40.html): The company sells heating systems — boilers, and increasingly heat pumps — in one small European market. It is the national sales arm of a large German manufacturer: €30 million in revenue, €9 million - [The Algorithmic Bench: Who Owns standard of care in Autonomous Diagnostic Triage?](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/41.html): The emergency department at Jane General Hospital System was operating at 140% capacity when the executive committee deployed Aegis-Triage, an advanced AI decision-support agent designed to prioritize - [The Stadium That Drank the Water](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/42.html): In a semi-arid county in East Africa, the decision has already been taken in private. The county government, supported by the national political leadership, is about to break ground on a multi-purpose - [The Line at the Bottom of the Email](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/43.html): The test was meant to be routine. By Thursday it was the most uncomfortable slide in the commercial review. Eight months earlier, the company had rolled out an AI agent to its outbound team. - [Who Understands the Code?](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/44.html): A small software company develops a specialised platform used by customers around the world. The company has a close technical team: eight developers work on new features and improve the software, whi - [The Sentence That Decided Nothing](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/46.html): “The router loses the signal every evening. I pay for the fastest package, and my children do their homework on mobile data.” It was one of several thousand comments in the February customer survey. T - [The Cognitive Atrophy Dilemma](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/47.html): For most of human history, progress has followed a simple pattern. We created tools to reduce physical effort. The wheel reduced carrying. The engine reduced walking. The crane reduced lifting. Every - [Accountability Without Authority](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/48.html): Daniel was a middle manager in the finance function of a large company operating in a volatile and demanding market. Formally, his role was to manage a team, ensure that the department delivered its o - [Who Chooses the Next 240?](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/49.html): I coordinate programmes for a pan-African network of university innovation hubs, supported by a UN agency. There are 23 hubs in 21 African countries, with five more opening by December. Many of the st - [The Manager Who Was Faster Than Everyone](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/50.html): The first sign that something had changed was not the quality of the work. It was the speed. Within three months, one middle manager had become impossible to keep up with. He answered emails within mi - [The Robot That Came First](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/51.html): The first meeting was supposed to be about a robot. Within an hour, it became a conversation about what kind of hospital the customer intended to become. The hospital was privately owned, financially - [The Automation That Failed Because It Worked](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/52.html): The process was quite simple. When a customer had an insurance claim and the insurer needed photographs, an employee entered the claim into InScope and sent the customer a link. The customer opened th - [The Veto Nobody Wanted to Call](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/53.html): I run the Quality Assurance and Control Department at a small pharmaceutical company. We distribute medicines and medical devices, and we operate a small manufacturing line. Around 120 people work her - [The Standard in Her Head](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/54.html): The order was one the brand had been working toward for three years. A regional retailer wanted a collection of naturally dyed, eco-printed garments, ten times the brand's usual monthly volume, with a - [From Alarm to Action](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/55.html): 02:17. The night shift in a telecom Network Operations Center sees three BTS/cell-unavailable alarms appear in the RAN monitoring tool. Three sites are not unusual enough, by themselves, to explain th - [The Architect Who Became the Bottleneck](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/56.html): I have run my architecture practice for thirteen years. It is a small office, and that has always been part of its strength. Clients know who is responsible. Decisions can be made quickly. I know the - [The Dashboard Nobody Asked For](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/57.html): It is the last week of the month, and Alex is doing what he has done every month since he joined: preparing the billing reconciliations for the corporate print fleets his manager is responsible for. H - [Everyone's Initiative, Nobody's Decision](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/58.html): A fictional leadership case for discussion. The managing director had built the branch himself. When he arrived in Zagreb, the local office of the international group had twenty people and one large c - [The Control That Never Sleeps](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/59.html): For years, the final check before a loan is disbursed has looked much the same. - [The Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/60.html): On 15 May 2026, one hundred and thirty-five years to the day after Rerum novarum, Pope Leo XIV signed Magnifica humanitas, an encyclical on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial inte - [The Companies That Never Knock](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/book/chapters/61.html): The services were ready. The AI experts were available. The European funding was in place. Companies could receive support, training and access to advanced digital expertise at little or no direct cos ## Chronicles - [Twelve Leaders, Four Questions](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/chronicles/twelve-leaders-four-questions/): What the people coming to Zadar look forward to, where they see AI’s opportunities and risks, which skills the leaders of the future will need, and where CDayZ can spark collaboration — in their own words - [Trade Cannot Prosper Without Trust](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/chronicles/trade-cannot-prosper-without-trust/): What the Zadar Commune teaches the AI economy — the first lesson of the Zadar Declaration - [Human Leadership at Algorithmic Speed](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/chronicles/human-leadership-at-algorithmic-speed/): AI as a force multiplier, not a substitute — the leadership core of the Zadar Declaration - [The Golden Age of the Zadar Commune](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/chronicles/the-golden-age-of-the-zadar-commune/): A Legacy of Trade, Law, and Independence - [The Chronicles Begin](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/chronicles/the-chronicles-begin/): Why CDayZ needs its own voice — and what will be signed in Zadar ## Machine-readable - [Full text](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/llms-full.txt) - [Sitemap](https://cdayz.cotrugli.tech/sitemap.xml)