Pete Winters on C-Suite Network, Strategic Consulting and the Future of AI in Business

Authority Magazine: Pete Winters on C-Suite Network, Strategic Consulting and the Future of AI in Business -- Listen Share The second thing I would encourage organizations to do — speaking primarily from the B2B side — is to recognize the significant impact that AI is going to have on their businesses. I would encourage every organization to take a deep look into the opportunity of becoming a hybrid model. Eventually, their traditional model is going to be usurped by many of the capabilities in AI. I think it’s going to come faster and be more explosive than most of us realize in the coming two to three years.

Embracing the bandwagon would be second on my list. The second thing I would encourage organizations to do — speaking primarily from the B2B side — is to recognize the significant impact that AI is going to have on their businesses. I would encourage every organization to take a deep look into the opportunity of becoming a hybrid model. Eventually, their traditional model is going to be usurped by many of the capabilities in AI. I think it’s going to come faster and be more explosive than most of us realize in the coming two to three years. Embracing the bandwagon would be second on my list. I had the pleasure of talking with Pete Winters.

Pete grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, the youngest of 11 children in a household shaped by the presence of many older siblings and attentive parents. Born into a large family, Winters has often said that his earliest education came less from formal instruction and more from observation. Surrounded by adults and near-adults from a young age, he developed a habit of listening closely and watching how people behaved, communicated, and solved problems.

Looking back, he has described those years as a blend of nature and nurture, where his natural curiosity was reinforced by constant exposure to adult conversations and responsibilities. His childhood included summers in Lake George, New York, an experience that added a different rhythm to his upbringing and left a lasting impression. Winters has described those years as formative, offering both freedom and perspective. He later realized that by the time he was 12, he had already absorbed a wide range of life experiences that many people encounter much later.

That early awareness of people, patterns, and context would become central to his professional life. In his early 20s, Winters married and started a family. He has two children, one living in Brooklyn, New York, and the other in Boston, Massachusetts. Today, he lives in Warwick, New York, about 70 miles north of New York City, where he continues his consulting and coaching work. Winters began his career in the printing industry, running a successful small printing business with offices in Midtown Manhattan.

By the late 1990s, he recognized that the industry was changing quickly as digital technologies reshaped how companies produced and distributed printed material. Rather than resist that shift, he pivoted into consulting, working with printing companies to help them rethink their business models before becoming obsolete. That transition brought him into contact with major technology and manufacturing firms moving into digital printing, including Xerox, Kodak, Hewlett-Packard, Canon, and Océ.

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The article discusses the significant transformation AI brings to business models, which is highly relevant and impactful for brand strategy professionals, though the integration of AI in business is becoming increasingly common.