A Plan Is Not an AI Strategy: Smart Cookies with Julie Averill
At our September Smart Cookies live panel in Seattle, we explored a pressing challenge: AI ambition is outrunning execution. Leaders from Tableau, PitchBook, the Gates Foundation, and Nordstrom shared what it really takes to move AI from promise to practice.
In this episode, we continue that conversation with Julie Averill, former CIO of Lululemon and author of Chief Impact Officer. Drawing on decades of leading technology transformation, Julie challenges the idea of “AI wishing” and explores why strategy, culture, trust, and the people closest to the work are essential to turning AI ambition into real business impact.
Key Takeaways
- AI wishing is not an implementation strategy. You cannot wave a magic wand, sprinkle pixie dust, and skip the hard work of putting AI into practice. Enthusiasm alone does not create results.
- A plan drives efficiency. A strategy creates new opportunities. Improving existing operations is valuable, but real AI transformation means asking what your business can do today that was never possible before.
- A great demo is not the same as enterprise readiness. Demos can work beautifully on clean data. Real enterprises often operate across disparate systems that handle data differently. Making that data usable is still hard work.
- Culture is not a soft topic. It makes innovation possible. The teams closest to the business often see opportunities leadership cannot. But those ideas only emerge when people have the freedom to experiment, speak honestly, and fail without punishment.
- Honesty builds trust faster than any pitch. Founders do not need to pretend their products are enterprise grade before they are. Being transparent about limitations creates the foundation for stronger partnerships.
- Technology has accelerated. People have not. AI may move faster than previous technology waves, but transformation still depends on earning trust, changing how people work, and bringing teams along on the journey.
If you’re working through these decisions in your organization, we’d be glad to continue the conversation with you. Connect with KG Digital
Full transcript
Bryon: Well, welcome to Smart Cookies, Julie. For our listeners, I’m Bryon Scharenberg, and I’m sitting down with Julie Averill today. A quick introduction: Julie, you’ve spent the last 30 years bringing new technology into organizations. Eight of those years you were the CIO at Lululemon, with time at Nordstrom and REI along the way, here in the greater Seattle area.
This summer, many of you may have read the guest essay Julie wrote for The New York Times telling companies to stop kidding themselves about AI. It has traveled well beyond the tech world and picked up a lot of steam. We’ll talk about that today.
A lot of your professional time now, Julie, you spend advising leaders and boards, and most recently you published a book called Chief Impact Officer, which I’ve been reading and find very interesting. One of the things that stuck with me is how you talk about your parents: your dad Earl, and how he built trust with people, and your mom Pat, who inspired the name of your current advisory company. Gold Thread was a bit of a nod to her being a seamstress. Is that right?
Julie: Right. It’s called Gold Thread, so it’s really… I got it ’cause there’s threads on the thread of a baseball. My mom was a seamstress, so really a nod to both of them.
Bryon: Love that. Well, along with your professional career, your personal life, you also document that throughout the book: you and your wife Cindy, and your three kids along the way, and the journeys that that has intertwined with your professional career. I’m very thankful that you’re here today with us, Julie, and excited to talk about your journey and background, and how we can learn from that. So thank you for being here.
Julie: Yeah, happy to be here, Bryon.
Bryon: One of the things I love asking the guests on our show and when we do these events is thinking back to when you were a kid and you thought about your future. What did you wanna be when you grew up?
Julie: The only thing I can remember is that I wanted to be president. It was mostly because there had never been a girl president, and I didn’t understand why. So that was kind of the childhood goal. But then as I got a little older, I really got into computers early, early days. But I still never…
Even when I went to college and I got a degree in computer science, I didn’t think it was for my career. I just loved computers, but I had no female role models that I could see who had great careers in technology. So it was just my destiny. I knew it was my destiny, but I wasn’t sure how it all was gonna work out.
Bryon: Yeah. I heard you say recently your dad, who had a number of years as a professional baseball player, was a catcher, very interesting to learn about, but later went on to work for RadioShack, for those of us that remember RadioShack. But you talked about how he brought home a TRS-80, and you kind of became an expert at it, right?
And starting even as a late teenager, you started doing some stuff with training others on Lotus 1-2-3. I’m curious if you think back on that time: you said it wasn’t where you thought your career was gonna go, you just enjoyed technology and enjoyed what you were doing. Is there anything that you learned during those early years of wonder with technology that you feel like you still carry forward into today?
Julie: Yeah. A couple things come to mind. My dad had a small consulting business, and he was always absorbing the latest rounds of tech. Started with TRS-80s, but then when it really evolved, and people are gonna just go, “How old is this person?” But it evolved into desktop computing. He would sell the computers to local businesses, and I would go in and help them learn how to use them.
So yes, before Word, it was WordPerfect, and before Excel, it was Lotus 1-2-3, or maybe those were all at the same time. But what I took away from that was really just that I had to understand the business before I knew how to help them use the technology. And I think that’s what stuck with me throughout my career: let’s start with the problem we’re trying to solve before we find the right technology to put into place.
And then the other thing was just grit and hustle, right? From an early age I took that job. I pitched myself as an expert in Lotus 1-2-3 at, I was probably 17 years old, and got a job at a training center and started doing classroom training to local teams. And so it’s just, yeah, grit and hustle.
Bryon: I love that. Even as a dad to a teenage girl, I think of what a cool example of this 17-year-old, sounds like brimming with confidence, the fact that you could go into a business and say, “Okay, help me understand your challenges, and I’m gonna train you on these tools.”
Julie: Yeah, I don’t know if it was confidence. It was all scary. But I think I get this from my dad: I like to do hard things, and push myself. If it’s uncomfortable for me, then I’m probably gonna do it, ’cause I know that’s where I’m gonna grow, and it’s not gonna be as uncomfortable the next time.
Bryon: Yeah. I think kudos to your dad at the time who was willing to say, “Here, I’m gonna bring my teenage daughter along with the family business and give her a shot at this,” is pretty cool as well. You mentioned you like to do hard things. The op-ed that you wrote recently for The New York Times, was that a hard piece to write for you? And tell us a little bit about where that came from.
Julie: Well, it started with the fact that I left Lululemon, and I’m talking to all my CIO peers, and just these common themes of frustration of CIOs who have been in their jobs for long periods of time being successful, and all of a sudden a new technology, which is something that we know how to do.
We know how to do new technologies, but this one came in a different way. It came in because on November 22nd, 2023, when ChatGPT came to everyone’s mobile, all of a sudden everyone became an expert. And I say my sister-in-law was able to take a picture of the inside of her refrigerator and ask what was for dinner.
It solved problems that she never knew she had. And everyone had ideas about what this technology could do, as much as how powerful it was. And so there was a frenzy that started, that came from every executive, right?
The marketing executive wanted to know, right? They were getting pitched by all these little startups with different marketing platforms that were gonna transform. Same thing in supply chain. There was a supply chain platform that was gonna transform supply chain. And then boards heard about it too, and boards wanted an AI strategy.
And so these CIOs were sitting in this place where, “I don’t know what to do because just like a week ago, I was trying to get the business involved in technology, and now everyone’s an expert.”
Julie: And so that was really the impetus for it, was trying to call out this hysteria, this AI: I call it AI wishing, which is this magic, this AI magic that happens of…
And you think you can wave the magic wand and sprinkle the pixie dust all around and skip the hard work of actually implementing AI. And so it took me about five months to write that article. I pitched The New York Times, and I have so much respect for them throughout this process and their high standards.
And there were many times where I thought, “I don’t think this is gonna get published. Maybe I should just pitch it to another magazine.” But we finally got to this place where I knew they were interested, and then they just pushed every single sentence and challenged everything, and, “What about this? Put this in it.” It was an incredible process to go through. I think I’m a better writer as a result of it. But it was not an easy process. But I’m super proud of it. It got put in print, so that was really cool. And yeah, it started a conversation.
Bryon: Love that. Yeah, for those that don’t know, The New York Times is still a print newspaper. We’re so used to reading all these articles online. But why do you think, Julie, it’s had such a reception? It really resonated with a lot of people. What do you think it was that struck a chord with people, maybe even compared to what you thought the reaction would be?
Julie: Yeah. I think it just said the thing out loud that everyone was thinking. Everyone was feeling it, and I think I put words to it. And with that, people were able to take the conversation forward. I hear from so many people, “Thank you for saying the quiet part out loud. This is what I’ve been thinking. I’m gonna share this with my leadership. This is exactly what we needed to be able to talk about what’s happening in my company today.”
Bryon: Yeah, I think there was the point where you shared about how when ChatGPT was introduced, you have the board saying to the executives, “Hey, what’s our AI strategy?” And then the executive goes to their team and says, “What’s our AI strategy?” Who kind of just trickles down throughout the organization, everyone asking that question, and the result is really a punch list of everybody’s ideas. And those early days of AI strategy was just like, “Here’s what everyone is saying, and this is what we need to do.” It’s kind of this to-do list of all these things. What do you think now, sitting a couple of years removed from that, obviously we’re still in the midst of it, when somebody asks you what AI strategy should really look like, where would you start with them?
Julie: Yeah. I see it happening in two forms. One, there’s a huge draw to look at the efficiencies, to look at the bottom line, put it throughout operations, start small. The ones that are succeeding are starting small, solving a specific problem, and then growing from there. So companies really are starting to see the returns when they look at efficiencies. To me, that’s not really a strategy: that is a plan. A strategy creates new opportunities, and so the real interesting conversations are those companies that are saying, “What can we do today that we’ve never been able to do? Where is there now a lane for us that we can get into before our competitors get there? How can we reach our customers differently? How can we give them experiences that they’ve never thought about? How can we redefine how our company presents itself, the things that we do because of AI?” That’s harder because that requires you to operate in a very creative space, and for companies that have been successful for many years running, the hardest thing to do is reinvent yourself, right?
And to maybe stop doing some of the things that you’ve been doing or to do something maybe that could be competitive with what you’re already doing. So those are the hardest ones. But if I was gonna define an AI strategy, and this is what I challenge teams to do: think differently and get outside your box and think about what might be possible.
Bryon: I’m curious why it seems like, and I think you’re right in that distinction, there’s a quote that I wrote down from your book. You said, “Leaders today are failing when they’re framing AI as an efficiency play when it’s actually a transformation play,” which is what you said. It’s about unlocking opportunity. It’s not just about doing things more efficiently. But I’m very curious why it seems like that is an easy trap to fall into, just thinking about how it can drive efficiency and how it can unlock the things that we’re already doing to be doing better and faster and cheaper.
Julie: Right. Especially in… Sorry, I was just gonna add onto that. In the economy that we’re in today, where top-line growth is hard, and everyone is looking for efficiencies so that they can support the strategies that they have in place, it’s really difficult. So there are some stats out on this that differentiate companies’ efforts into different buckets, and that bucket at the top that is really looking at, I think Deloitte calls it… I’m not gonna name it, but there’s a name that they use for it, and like 5% of companies, and these are the ones seeing outsized returns. But it’s really difficult to get there because it requires a lot of things. One is the safety to fail, right? You’re not gonna get it right the first time.
If this was easy and the road were already paved, we’d all be on it already. But this requires invention and thinking, and to do that, you gotta be able to say dumb ideas. You gotta be able to try things that haven’t been tried before, and not punish those who fail, right? You celebrate those who tried.
Bryon: It seems like that’s true for much of your… I mentioned to you earlier, I’m reading your book, and it’s kind of this mix of what I see, and I think you even describe as this personal memoir, as well as leadership guidance or leadership lessons maybe from what you’ve learned along the way.
But I’ll say honestly, Julie, I didn’t know when I picked up a book that says Chief Impact Officer that you’d spend a lot of time talking about culture in there, which is a refreshing surprise. I think not something that quite honestly I was intending to be reading when I read through your book.
But I think that’s to your point of the freedom to fail or freedom to offer new ideas, dumb ideas maybe at first. How have you seen, I guess, the conversation around… I’m imagining that some of our listeners are technology executives. They’re folks that are trying to answer that question of how do we roll out AI effectively? How do we get better results? How do we transform our company? And in my mind, or even in the conversations I have, oftentimes it’s easy to go to strategy, framework, planning, tools, all of these kinds of things that are not at all, at first glance, culture related.
And yet some of the things that you talk about, like having honesty to trust your team, is actually the foundation that you need to start from. What are some of those other things that you’ve seen, and maybe in your work with teams, how do you even begin to identify that maybe it’s the culture that needs some work first before you start on some of these other areas?
Julie: Yeah. This is my fundamental belief. I helped Lululemon grow from 2 billion to 10 billion over the course of eight years, and so much of that was technology. The company strategy was highly dependent on the technology strategy, and so I had to create a team that could move really fast in many directions at one time.
I changed my beliefs about how I lead and what’s important through this. And so that’s what the book talks about: it’s really a memoir ’cause it’s like how I came to believe it and then what I’ve seen. So I have seen innovation at scale, and it does not come from the CEO and their direct reports defining what the rainbow looks like, as much as it does the teams closest to the business saying, “Let’s try this.” And then they get excited, and they come forward like, “We tried this thing. It’s really exciting. We’d like to do it.” “Okay, here’s some money. Go figure the rest of it out.” And seeing that happen at scale, where you have a business leader and you have a technology team partnered together, so you’ve got someone deeply knowledgeable of finance, one that’s deeply knowledgeable about the customer experience in your stores or about supply chain or about opening in new markets, and they are the ones that are able to say, “Here’s how we should do things differently.”
And that is like a snowball effect, right? So the innovation, the success, the try without getting punished, is really just… It’s magnetic. I don’t know how to describe it, but I’ve seen it, and that’s why I believe culture is so important. If you’re prescriptive and you’re holding people back because they’re not able to really express what they really think or be who they really are, you’re living in a constrained environment.
Culture can free that. Culture can create a space where people can really bring all of their ideas forward and create incredible things.
Bryon: One of the words that’s coming to mind as I hear you say that, that I think is crucial within that culture, is honesty about who you really are. Not trying to… I think this goes with the theme of AI washing you describe in your essay. We’re trying to pretend what AI is doing for us or the outcomes it’s driving, and not really, I think of integrity or honesty as just being truthful about what the current state is. That seems to me like it’s been a theme for you in a few different ways, both in your professional journey of being honest about who you are and what you’re good at, maybe what you’re not yet good at.
One of my takeaways from that idea of honesty is actually quite a challenging one, I think, for us in modern-day business circles, particularly founders who are working on maybe they do have an AI startup or they’re working on a company they’re bringing to market.
And I heard you say recently at an event speaking to founders that it’s okay to talk honestly about the gaps that your product has or what you can’t yet do, and I think that’s a bit counterintuitive, honestly, because you think about, “Well, I have an opportunity to pitch an executive or solve one of their problems. I don’t wanna tell them what I can’t do yet.” Why have you seen that be something that you value or even champion on teams? It feels a bit counterintuitive to us.
Julie: Yeah. I just give people credit for being smart. And if you’re not taking the honest route: first of all, I’m super intuitive, so if somebody’s trying to hide something, I’m gonna sort it out. And I have much more respect for someone who will be honest with me, because that builds trust.
And with trust, we can have a relationship, and with a relationship, we can have a partnership, and with a partnership, we’re interested in mutual wins. But if I’m asking and poking around something and I know there’s a hole in the product and they’re disguising it, there’s no trust, right? They’re acting suspicious.
There’s no trust. And I’m probably not gonna wanna do business with someone that doesn’t start from that foundation. And sitting in a CIO spot, when you’re talking to a founder, right, you get it that this is a person with an idea and who is working to bring something to market and may not have a ton of experience behind what that really looks like in a business.
So you know, you get this. You know who you’re talking to. So for founders to try to pretend that they’re enterprise grade is just not helpful to anyone. And so, yeah, in my life too, I have lived the other way. I’ve tried to live a life that I thought everyone wanted me to be instead of the person I really was.
It was exhausting and limiting for me. I didn’t let people see my real self. I didn’t build the relationships that really mattered. And so once I got over all of that, I just have clarity. And in my role now, integrity and honesty is just so important to me and the people that I work with. I just don’t wanna spend time in a different world.
Bryon: Yeah. I think there’s wisdom in that both for us as individuals and people, and professionally. Companies being honest about where their gaps are with AI as well as what is still aspirational builds trust with your stakeholders and your partners. And in my experience too, someone that’s authentic is much more enjoyable to do business with and have a relationship with than somebody that you need to call out on things.
Julie: Yeah. Yeah.
Bryon: I’d like to pivot a bit to something that you’ve mentioned: there’s nothing new about AI in the sense of the transformation work that it requires compared to prior innovation. And so, looking back on when cloud came around and the internet came around, you talk about how all of those things still required work. It wasn’t this magic wand. In your experience, what are some of those early lessons learned from the prior innovation cycles that we’ve gone through that apply here at AI, and what’s maybe different?
Julie: I’ll start with what’s different. What’s different is the speed. Technology used to be, as we said at REI, the long pole in the tent, right? So an initiative would take nine months, a year, two, three years. That’s not what happens anymore, right? The speed has changed tremendously.
But where the speed has not changed is with people, right? People still are the hardest part of the job, and that involves understanding how they do their jobs and getting their trust to do a transformation, to change, to bring people on the journey. All these things that have always been hard are now maybe harder because the technology is faster. So maybe we’re not thinking as much about how important it is because a project only takes three weeks to do, right? But the people side of it is still hard. And then the other part that’s still hard is data, especially in enterprises, right? It’s really easy to show a demo that works really quickly and really perfectly on clean data, and enterprises aren’t sitting on top of clean data, especially in retail.
There’s myriad disparate systems that each manipulate their part of the data puzzle differently. And untangling that and understanding how to get the truth out of the data is still hard work.
Bryon: Yeah. And so some of those things carrying over from prior challenges of moving through these innovations, still dealing with data challenges. Are there other things that you think are similar learnings that would benefit us to pause and look back and remember a little bit of, what we’ve been through before that would help us now?
Julie: About maybe the omnichannel journey. I had the good fortune of being at Nordstrom when we were really inventing omnichannel. It seems just so easy now when we look at it, but the thought of converting stores into fulfillment centers, opening the inventory in a store to the online shopper was novel, and we had no idea how it was gonna work.
So the technology took a long time to implement. We were integrating inventory systems, we were replacing the order management system, and then about six weeks before we went live, we realized that we were building a pipe from the website into stores just for beauty items. And what if we didn’t filter it down and we did it for all items?
And so I went to the leaders at that time and said, “All right. Do you guys wanna sell all the products in the stores online?” And that maybe was the stupidest question of my career ’cause they looked at me like, “What’s the matter with you?” And I said, “Well, here’s the problem. We haven’t had time to estimate what the change is gonna be to the stores.
We haven’t had time to hire people to fulfill these. We haven’t had time to train people on the process. We haven’t had the ability to work with the mail rooms and understand what their capacity is.” And they’re like, “Do it. We’re gonna figure it out. We’re gonna figure it out.” So we did, and we burst the seams of the company.
It was crazy the amount of orders that came through. Jamie Nordstrom was in the Chicago store. He called me that day. I was in the Seattle store, and we were printing the orders on register tape because we hadn’t bought printers, right? We thought this was just gonna be an exception just for beauty items.
So here the registers are, ringing off the hook with orders, and he said, “Julie, I have 21 feet of orders here. What should I do?” I’m like, “Start fulfilling orders. That’s what we all had to do.” So you know, I think with that, that six weeks is probably more like what we’re in right now, where there could be enterprise change, and it takes a while, and you have to plan for that.
And you’ll wreak havoc on a company. This was good havoc. Everyone’s excited because the sales were through the roof, and we eventually built some filters to eliminate things like the $3 pair of socks that was on sale, and there’s only one pair, and those sort of things.
Bryon: I imagine this is a fun story to hear in hindsight and tell in hindsight, but you think about the havoc of that day: all hands on deck, go grab this pair of shoes, go figure out where it is, put it in a box. What an experience though. I’d like to move into some closing reflections. Well actually, before we do that, Julie, you’re continuing to advise teams. You’ve referenced some of this throughout our conversation and helping teams consider what are those opportunities for them. Where can they think creatively? What should AI strategy look like? Are there some common problems or challenges that leaders and boards are bringing to you that you find yourself engaging in day to day?
Julie: Yeah, I see a lot of companies still trying to figure out what is my AI strategy? How am I taking advantage of this new technology that I know has potential and maybe don’t know how it applies to my business? Where should I start? How do I prioritize it? And so I talk to companies about just the reality of how to get started,
Bryon: Ja.
Julie: and then also where to dream. So looking at what’s the readiness across the company, right? From people, from data, from the technology. Where do we think the real returns are gonna be? Where are the advocates? There’s a lot of variables that are making AI either more successful or less successful, and so it’s a lot of fun for me to go in and just have those conversations with companies and help them really sort through the sandstorm that came with all the promises of AI and really get clear on where the opportunities are and where they wanna begin.
Bryon: Yeah. Are you enjoying it now that you’re more in an external advisor seat than a lot of your earlier career?
Julie: Yeah, it’s so much fun. What I really love is meeting the teams, being able to go into different companies and have these conversations, and you learn different industries and the challenges of different industries. And so it’s really… I’m having a great time.
Bryon: That’s cool. What is, in a closing reflection, for those that are maybe feeling a little bit disillusioned or overwhelmed with the speed at which things are moving, or maybe they feel like they’ve missed the boat on some things, what might you tell that leader, that person who’s feeling that way? What advice would you give them?
Julie: Lean in, get started, educate yourself. But remember, you’re the person who understands the business, so this is not about going out and finding a technology that’s gonna fix something that you know best about. It’s about solving your problems maybe in a different way. But you’ve gotta, there’s so much to learn, and I would just say know that there’s so much possible now than there ever was before, but there’s still a lot of hard work to do it.
Bryon: Yeah. I like that encouragement of leaning into the thing that you already have expertise in, understanding the business. That’s not something that’s changing or going away, but leveraging that, adding onto it, maybe even to enhance it, to make them smarter.
Julie: The people who built the businesses are the ones that are in the opportunity to really lead these exciting transformations, right? They created it in the first place, so they understand that business side and where those opportunities are. So I’m looking for those folks to lean in and lead us to what’s next.
Bryon: Yeah. Awesome. Well, one unrelated question. Listeners and those that are viewing this on video can see that Averill paddle behind you. Is that a pro model?
Julie: It was a departing gift from my Lululemon team to me. I’m a little bit of a pickleball fanatic. But I think this one’s a little bit more for show.
Bryon: Okay, that’s not your main paddle then. Maybe another career launching? You’re pro pickler?
Julie: I wish I had those skills, ’cause that’s definitely what I would be doing.
Bryon: That’s awesome. That’s fun. Well, Julie, it’s been really fun to have you here today, and thank you for sharing your wisdom and also just your journey and experience.
We’ll point our listeners to, I know if they’re interested to get in touch with you, julieaverill.com is the place that they can go for more information on your book, on your op-ed, as well as your other kinds of advisory work that you’re doing can be found there. Is that right?
Julie: Yeah. Thank you, Bryon.
Bryon: Awesome. Good deal. Thanks, Julie.