Stellant Group now represents Julie Averill, founder and CEO of Gold Thread LLC and author of Chief Impact Officer.
Averill’s work centers on a single argument: AI does not fix an organization’s culture, it reveals it. 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. 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. In an April 2026 survey by Writer and Workplace Intelligence, 75% of C-suite executives said their company’s AI strategy is more for show than real guidance. MIT’s Project NANDA found that 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots never delivered measurable results.
The failure, Averill argues, is almost never technical. Her answer rests on three pillars, each of which translates into an organizational design choice: psychological safety before scale; influence over authority; and culture as competitive infrastructure, run like an operating system with the same rigor the business applies to any other system it depends on.
Keynote, AI Wishing and AI Washing
Featuring Julie Averill
Averill served eight years as global chief information officer and executive vice president at lululemon, leading the technology transformation that helped scale the company from $2 billion to more than $10 billion in revenue. She reported directly to the CEO and built global teams across the United States, Canada, China and India, reshaping ecommerce, retail, supply chain and cybersecurity. She launched lululemon’s India Technology Hub and built it to nearly 50% women engineers, against an industry average of about 34%. The hub was recognized with a NASSCOM AI Gamechangers award. Before lululemon, she was REI’s first chief information officer, and before that she spent more than a decade at Nordstrom helping pioneer the early omnichannel capabilities that connected digital and physical retail.
TIME excerpted Chief Impact Officer when the book launched in June 2026. Her New York Times guest essay on AI washing, published in August 2026, ranked among the most-read pieces on the site that month. In the weeks that followed she took the case to CNBC’s Squawk Box, Bloomberg’s The Close, NBC Bay Area’s Press:Here and KING 5 News in Seattle. She is a contributor to Forbes, writing for its Leadership section and CIO Network.
In the past year she has delivered main-stage keynotes 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.
Her work resonates in leadership conversations about AI strategy, organizational transformation and the cultural infrastructure required to turn AI pilots into operational capability.
Julie Averill is exclusively represented by Stellant Group for speaking engagements, including keynotes, fireside chats and panel discussions with leadership teams thinking through AI strategy, organizational transformation and the gap between AI budgets and AI results. For consulting or advisory engagements with Julie, contact us for a custom proposal.
