How to Make an Impact in the AI Economy

Leaders everywhere are being asked to deliver AI-driven change. New tools, new budgets, big expectations. But what will set successful leaders apart isn’t how much technology they deploy. It’s how well they develop the human capabilities that turn tools into impact.

You can approve funding. You can set priorities. But results only happen when people trust the direction, feel ownership in the work, and can speak up when the truth is uncomfortable. That’s because real transformation comes from human, not artificial, intelligence.

AI makes human capability more important, not less. It changes how decisions get made and who has insight worth hearing. It rewards leaders who build alignment early, learn fast, and create space for others to contribute.

This is a pattern we have seen before. Every major technology wave creates urgency. And urgency leads to shortcuts. 

During the dot-com years, companies rushed to build websites because everyone else had one. The winners asked what the internet could make possible for their customers. Cloud adoption followed the same pattern.

Many expected automatic savings and speed. The leaders who gained the most understood that cloud wasn’t a destination—it was a different way of operating. The same thing is happening with AI. Some treat it as a project or a purchase. Others see it as an opportunity to rethink how they create value. 

The difference comes down to leadership. When you’ve already built trust, fast decisions become possible. I learned that at Nordstrom. We made a call about inventory visibility that created a $250 million revenue lift within months. That wasn’t magic. It was the result of relationships, clarity, and accountability that existed before we needed them.

At lululemon, I learned the opposite lesson. Two days before I officially started, the website went down for 20 hours. I discovered the outage, but more importantly, I found the systems underneath it—the people, the processes, the technology. That moment showed me ownership, transparency, and a bias for action was what we needed to build.

What both lessons taught me is that transformation is a human problem first. Technology just amplifies whatever capability already exists.

And right now, AI is forcing that truth into the open.

You can’t bolt artificial intelligence onto broken processes and dysfunctional teams and expect transformation. The technology exposes unclear decision rights, territorial behavior, and people hoarding information instead of sharing it. AI doesn’t fix your culture. It reveals it.

At the same time, the workforce has changed. Gen Z watched their parents perform loyalty to companies that laid them off by spreadsheet. They’re not buying it. They want to be part of something real, and they’ll walk away from prestige and paychecks if the culture is hollow or the leadership is phony. They’re right to. This convergence is what makes the old playbook fail.

Command and control, information as power, transformation by decree—none of it works anymore. Not for harnessing AI’s potential, and not for earning commitment from people who have options. The leaders who will make it are the ones who build trust before they need it, who tell the truth even when it’s uncomfortable, and who understand that technology is the easy part.

Technology doesn’t transform companies. People do. AI will amplify whatever leadership exists, strong or weak. The goal isn’t to build better workers. It’s to develop better humans who happen to do extraordinary work because you helped them become more capable, more confident, more fully themselves.

The capabilities that matter most for transformation take time to build. And sometimes you don’t know you’re building them until you look back and see that they became the foundation upon which you built everything.

Systems thinking. Self-worth that doesn’t depend on external validation. The courage to speak truth when silence is easier. The ability to build trust across differences. These aren’t skills you can acquire in a weekend workshop or from a consulting framework. They’re patterns formed through experience, tested under pressure, and refined over time.

You’re building your own foundation right now, whether you realize it or not. The question is whether you’re paying attention to what the experiences are teaching you.

Excerpted from Chief Impact Officer: Real Transformation Comes from Human—Not Just Artificial—Intelligence by Julie Averill, published by 8080 Books. Copyright © 2026 by Julie Averill. All rights reserved.