Chief Impact Officer: Real Transformation Comes from Human--Not Just Artificial--Intelligence - Paperback

by Julie Averill (Author)

Julie Averill, the CIO behind lululemon's rapid growth from $2B to $10B shares a playbook for executives and technology leaders navigating today's AI revolution, and reveals why authentic human leadership is your competitive advantage.

Every organization claims they're "doing AI," but many are just burning money on technology while ignoring the human intelligence required to make transformations stick. Julie Averill learned this the hard way while scaling lululemon from a $2 billion athletic apparel company to a $10 billion global powerhouse as their Global CIO.

In Chief Impact Officer, Julie pulls back the curtain on what actually happens when you try to transform a company. This isn't a polished case study or a consultant's framework. It's the messy, honest story of leading through a pandemic, building technology teams across three continents, and discovering that the hardest part of transformation has nothing to do with the technology.

As a lesbian in high tech and corporate retail, Julie learned that succeeding meant showing up as her authentic self - not despite her identity, but because of what that journey taught her about building trust. That realization allowed her to build an India Tech Hub with nearly 50% women engineers (earning NASSCOM's AI Game Changer Award), lead through a pandemic that turned every assumption about work upside down, and create the psychological safety that high-performance teams need. She discovered that influence without authority beats positional power, that vulnerability is a leadership competency, and that the professional masks that helped her climb the ladder were exactly what was holding her team back.

But she also made mistakes, faced failures, and had to unlearn decades of code-switching and strategic silence.

This book is for executives, technology leaders, and anyone responsible for driving change. It's for leaders tired of AI hype who want the truth: transformation requires psychological safety, not just algorithms. It demands vulnerability, not just vision. And it needs leaders who understand that culture isn't a soft skill - it's your competitive infrastructure.

With practical insights from building global technology organizations at lululemon, Nordstrom, and REI, Julie delivers a blueprint for leading in the AI era that's grounded in reality, not buzzwords. Because real transformation requires human, not just artificial, intelligence.

Author Biography

As Chief Information Officer of lululemon, Julie Averill led the technology transformation that helped scale the company from $2 billion to over $10 billion in revenue while building global teams capable of sustaining that growth. Prior to lululemon, she led omni-channel and digital transformations at Nordstrom and REI, navigating system failures, high-stakes crises, and the complicated work of integrating technology with business strategy at scale.

Julie spent her career navigating systems that weren't designed for her - and helped change them along the way. A female leader in technology. A gay woman in rooms where difference still raises eyebrows. A mother who carried two and adopted one child while leading global technology organizations. And a Chief Information Officer who believes the future of AI depends less on machines and more on how human we're willing to be.

Today, she advises boards, CEOs, and founders at the intersection of AI capability and organizational readiness - the place where most transformations stall. She speaks globally on leadership in the age of AI and helps organizations build what technology can't deliver: teams that tell the truth, leaders who can turn pilots into real change, and cultures that sustain transformation instead of performing it.

After years in corporations proving herself, building teams, and transforming companies, Julie learned that what matters most is not the systems you build or the revenue you generate, but the people whose capabilities you unlock, the leaders who become more than they thought possible, and the ripple effects that continue long after you're gone.

She lives in Bellevue, Washington, with her wife Cindy and their three children. When not speaking, advising, or writing, she's on the pickleball court, traveling to visit family across continents, or learning from her global family that the most profound transformations happen when we expand who we're willing to become.