Julie Averill

Boards are approving record AI budgets, and most cannot yet point to what those budgets bought. Pilots multiply, titles get rewritten, press releases announce transformation, and the operating results stay flat. What leaders need is a way to tell the difference between change that is actually being built and change that is being performed. Julie Averill spent nearly three decades on the inside of that problem, and she now helps executives and directors solve it.

Averill served eight years as Global Chief Information Officer and Executive Vice President at lululemon, leading the technology and operating transformation that helped scale the company from $2 billion to more than $10 billion in revenue. She built and led global teams across the United States, Canada, China and India, and she reported directly to the CEO as a member of the senior leadership team. Before lululemon she was the first Chief Information Officer in REI’s history, and before that she spent more than a decade at Nordstrom as Vice President of Selling and Marketing Technology, helping pioneer the early omnichannel capabilities that connected digital and physical retail. Today she is CEO and Chief Impact Officer of Gold Thread LLC, her advisory and speaking practice, where she advises boards, CEOs and executive teams on AI strategy and organizational transformation.

Averill is not a commentator on innovation and technology transformation. She has led them for three decades, through successive waves, and every tool was the new thing when she deployed it. Each one took time, a lot of people and real budget. Each one worked.

That is the standing from which she names what is going wrong now, and she names two failure modes that most companies are running at once. AI wishing is the belief that AI is magic, that you can wave it at a hard problem and skip the work of solving it. It is sincere, and that is what makes it dangerous. AI washing is its insidious cousin: claiming to do more with AI than you actually are, because the board wants progress and a leader who cannot show something starts to look like the problem. Seventy-five percent of executives told a recent survey their AI strategy is more for show. MIT’s Project NANDA found that 95 percent of enterprise generative AI pilots never delivered real results.

The failure is almost never technical. The demo is extraordinary. The tool wants clean data and decisions made in repeatable ways, and a real company has a dozen systems that do not agree and decades of exceptions layered on top. What is left is the part that was always ours. Which is why Averill’s thesis is that AI does not fix an organization’s culture, it reveals it. Where people believe the tool is being scored against their job, they hide, they resist, and they wait you out. Forty-four percent of Gen Z workers and roughly a third of the broader workforce say they are actively sabotaging their company’s AI rollout.

Three pillars follow, and each translates into an organizational design choice. Psychological safety before scale, because teams cannot move quickly on a foundation of fear. Influence over authority, because most consequential change is driven by leaders whose mandate exceeds their formal control. Culture as competitive infrastructure, treated as an operating system with the same rigor applied to any other system the business depends on.

That argument anchors her book Chief Impact Officer (8080 Books, 2026), published by Microsoft’s imprint and distributed by Simon & Schuster, with a foreword by Bret Arsenault, Microsoft’s longtime Chief Information Security Officer and now its Global Chief Security Advisor. She made the case for a general audience in a New York Times guest essay in August 2026, which became the sixth most-read piece on the site.

What’s Left to Lead: Why Most AI Transformations Stall Before They Scale

Organizations run credible pilots, then discover that nothing carries into production because the surrounding system was never prepared to absorb it. Decision rights are unclear. Teams protect territory. People closest to the work can see that the results are being oversold, and they have learned it is safer to stay quiet.

The argument has traveled. TIME excerpted the book, and she writes for Forbes in both its Leadership section and its CIO Network. In the weeks after the Times essay ran she took the case to CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Bloomberg’s “The Close,” NBC Bay Area’s “Press:Here” and KING 5 in Seattle.

The value is diagnostic. Averill gives leaders a way to interrogate their own AI portfolio: which investments are producing capability, which are producing narrative, and which organizational conditions have to change before the next round of spending is justified. Leaders leave able to ask sharper questions of their own teams and vendors, and to tell a pilot that is genuinely on a path to production from one that is quietly stuck.

Building Organizations That Grow Without Breaking

Hypergrowth exposes every structural weakness a company has, and Averill has managed that exposure at scale. During her tenure at lululemon she reshaped ecommerce, retail, supply chain and cybersecurity while standing up technology hubs across four countries and building the operating model to hold them together.

The clearest example is lululemon’s India Technology Hub, which she launched and built with nearly 50% women engineers in a market averaging 34%. The result came from designing inclusion into the hiring and operating model from the beginning rather than retrofitting it, and the work was recognized with NASSCOM’s AI Game Changer Award. Averill uses it to make a broader operational point: distributed teams underperform when they are treated as cost centers and outperform when they are built as capability partners with real ownership.

Executives leave with a model for sequencing growth investments. They also leave knowing which foundations have to be load bearing before headcount, geography or technology expands again.

What the Board Is Not Being Told

Averill has sat on both sides of this table. For eight years she presented quarterly to lululemon’s board as a public company CIO, building and answering for the technology, cybersecurity and AI strategy that went into the deck. She now serves on the board of Gorilla Commerce and the University of Washington Foundation Board, and she completed eight years as an independent director of INDOCHINO, where she was the company’s first independent board member.

She does not offer a governance framework. Boards have those. What she offers is a sitting director’s view of the questions boards should be asking and mostly are not, and how to evaluate an AI strategy without being the person who understands the technology. Which pilots are genuinely on a path to production and which are being kept alive for the slide. What “we are piloting AI” is usually covering for. Directors leave with better questions. Executives leave knowing which questions are coming.

Leadership Cannot Be Automated

The talk opens where the audience actually is. You have worked twice as hard to earn half the doubt. You have been the only one in rooms where that mattered. And now the technology arrives and everyone behaves as though the game has reset, as though nobody has an edge any more. It was never a level playing field, and the skills built navigating that one, reading a room, building trust without authority, leading through ambiguity with no safety net of assumed competence, are not soft skills. They are precisely what this moment demands of every leader.

Averill makes the case through three stories rather than a framework. A coffee house in Ethiopia, where competence got her there and presence got her her son. A room in December she could not manage, plan or fix, and did not need to. And the decision to leave the best job she ever had, from a company she had built well enough that it no longer needed her. The through line is that presence is not passive, that it is the hardest leadership choice available, and that you do not need a plan B when you are fully in the room.

It closes on the claim in the title. Leadership cannot be automated. Not the kind that walks into a room with no plan and stays anyway, or tells people the truth when the truth is hard, or builds something so good it eventually does not need you. Audiences leave with their own experience reframed as an advantage rather than a disadvantage, and with a decision to make about where they are still waiting for permission.

The AI-Readiness Roadmap

For teams that want to leave with a plan rather than a point of view, Averill runs a working session built on the same framework. Leadership groups map their current AI portfolio against the organizational conditions required to absorb it, find where the dual infrastructure of technology and culture is thin, and leave with a sequenced roadmap and a named owner for each step. The session runs as a half day or a full day and is built for intact leadership teams.

Averill’s credibility with senior audiences rests on current practice rather than retrospection. In the past year she has keynoted the main stage at Zinnov Confluence in Bengaluru, NRF Nexus, WNORTH at Whistler, The Millennium Alliance’s Digital Enterprise CIO Transformation Assembly, the 5CP Leadership Summit and IGNITE Worldwide, and she closed the main stage at the Women Leading Travel Forum. At WNORTH she also joined the conference panel on high-stakes decision making, moderated by Fortune’s Ellie Austin. She keynoted the Seattle CIO and CISO Executive Summits in 2025.

This fall she moderates a panel at Mobile Future Forward in Seattle, keynotes a private retail leadership event in London, joins the Financial Times Future of Retail Summit, and delivers keynotes for 50/50 Women on Boards and the Women in Retail Leadership Circle.

She was named CTO of the Year by CIO Dive, included in the Forbes CIO Next list of innovative technology leaders, recognized by the NRF Foundation on its list of people shaping retail’s future, named to Fast Company’s Queer 50, and honored with the Wequity CIO Luminary Award for her work building lululemon’s India hub. She holds an MBA from the University of Washington and a BA in Computer Science from Seattle Pacific University. She taught Leading Transformation as graduate faculty at the University of Washington Information School, and taught strategy and leadership as an adjunct professor at Seattle University earlier in her career.

She is a strong fit for organizations in the middle of significant AI investment, for leadership teams navigating growth that is outpacing their operating model, for boards that want the view from someone who spent eight years preparing the deck and now reads them, and for women’s leadership programs that want a speaker who does more than encourage. Her audiences leave with a clearer read on which of their own transformation efforts are real, a defensible sequence for the work that comes next, and language for the conversations that most organizations avoid until the cost of avoiding them comes due.

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Julie Averill is a technology executive, board director and author who helps organizations turn AI and technology investment into measurable business results. She spent nearly three decades leading transformation inside major retailers, and she now advises boards, CEOs and executive teams on the organizational conditions that determine whether technology investment produces returns.

Averill is CEO and Chief Impact Officer of Gold Thread LLC, her advisory and speaking practice. She serves on the board of Gorilla Commerce and the University of Washington Foundation Board.

Her work centers on AI strategy, innovation and technology transformation, built around a single argument: AI does not fix an organization’s culture, it reveals it. She teaches leaders to build psychological safety before scaling systems, to drive change through influence rather than formal authority, and to treat culture as competitive infrastructure with the same rigor applied to any other operating system.

Averill is the author of “Chief Impact Officer” (8080 Books, 2026), published by Microsoft’s imprint and distributed by Simon & Schuster, with a foreword by Bret Arsenault, Microsoft’s longtime Chief Information Security Officer and now its Global Chief Security Advisor. Her August 2026 New York Times guest essay on AI washing became the sixth most-read piece on the Times site. TIME excerpted the book, she contributes to Forbes in its Leadership section and its CIO Network, and her commentary has appeared on CNBC, Bloomberg, NBC Bay Area, KING 5 and in WWD.

She keynotes and leads fireside conversations for boards, technology organizations and executive teams on AI adoption, scaling through growth and governing technology from the boardroom. Recent platforms include the main stage at Zinnov Confluence in Bengaluru, NRF Nexus, WNORTH, The Millennium Alliance’s CIO Transformation Assembly, the Women Leading Travel Forum and IGNITE Worldwide. Averill was named CTO of the Year by CIO Dive, included on the Forbes CIO Next list of innovative technology leaders and recognized by the NRF Foundation on its list of people shaping retail’s future.

She served eight years as Global Chief Information Officer and Executive Vice President at lululemon, leading the transformation that helped scale the company from $2 billion to more than $10 billion in revenue while building teams across the globe. She was previously REI’s first Chief Information Officer and spent more than a decade at Nordstrom as Vice President of Selling and Marketing Technology. She completed eight years as an independent director of INDOCHINO, where she was the company’s first independent board member.

Averill holds an MBA from the University of Washington, a BA in Computer Science from Seattle Pacific University and executive certificates from Harvard University and Stanford University. She previously taught Leading Transformation as graduate faculty at the University of Washington Information School and Technology Strategy at Seattle University.

Julie Averill is available to advise your organization via virtual and in-person consulting meetings, interactive workshops and customized keynotes through the exclusive representation of Stern Speakers & Advisors, a division of Stern Strategy Group®.