Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I'm Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.

During his prolific acting career, Idris Elba has played a homicide detective, a drug lord, an all-seeing Marvel superhero, and anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela. But the British actor, who also runs a production company and has cofounded a creative agency and a skincare line, appears particularly at ease playing a CEO in a new marketing campaign for ServiceNow, the cloud-based software company.

A new commercial, debuting on Christmas Day, features Elba as a fictional chief executive walking through his company, highlighting all the different ways ServiceNow's artificial intelligence (AI) technology is supporting employees in human resources, IT, and customer service. The campaign is the latest product to come out of a partnership Elba has forged with the tech company and CEO Bill McDermott, which also includes a commitment to work together to bring energy and clean water resources to Sherbro Island off the coast of Sierra Leone.

In an interview with Modern CEO, Elba underscored that he's not merely a spokesperson for the product. "When the [ServiceNow] team came to my offices, I said, 'I need to use the product,'" he recalls. "I have a small workforce across various different verticals. And I needed to understand the product so that I can be a part of a genuine partnership. So, I'm integrating it into IE7 and the Akuna Group, which are my parent companies, so that when I'm in these commercials I have a much better sense of what I'm saying and why I'm saying it."