Abstract

Executives increasingly encounter organizations through AI-mediated summaries, dashboards, assistants, analytic systems, workflow records, and conversational interfaces. Existing research explains many parts of this condition, including executive information systems, decision support, business intelligence, situation awareness, sensemaking, organizational memory, temporal structuring, human-AI interaction, trust in automation, and AI governance. What remains insufficiently specified is how these elements should be integrated into one governed operating experience in which AI participates in organizational cognition without holding autonomous organizational authority. This conceptual paper defines Executive Operating Experience as a governed human-AI joint cognitive operating episode through which represented organizational reality is interpreted, prioritized, briefed, inspected, discussed, authorized, acted upon, remembered, and learned from across organizational time. The paper develops an integrative conceptual model, identifies core operating mechanisms, derives design principles and propositions, and defines governance and evaluation requirements. It argues that executive operating experiences should be assessed not as interfaces alone, but as organizationally consequential episodes linking attention, evidence, uncertainty, conversation, decision authority, action traceability, memory, continuity, and learning. The contribution is an integrative design-theory framework for future research and design of conversational operating systems for AI-native organizations.