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.

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.

The following excerpt comes from Chapter 1: "Before I Even Started." 

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You Can't Outsource What Matters Most

In my first month at lululemon, I was scrambling to get the team together and build a plan for the new website, bit I first needed to make sure the old one didn’t collapse. I called Oracle, our hosting partner, to talk about website resilience. They were the same vendor behind a recent twenty-hour outage. I wanted to know what they planned to do about it.

Now, for perspective and fairness, Oracle had received very little direction from lululemon prior to this. The three confident salesmen (yes men), walked in polished and confident, schooled from years of an easy relationship. They brought multiple copies of a bound PowerPoint. I wanted a conversation, not a presentation, but took deep breaths to respect the history.

The lead consultant opened his laptop, smiled, and said, “We think you’ll be pleased with this solution. As a new CIO, you want to have the peace of mind to know that if the site goes down again, it won’t be 20 hours.” It probably would have been better if they had started with an apology for all the revenue lost with the outage they were responsible for.

Those deep breaths turned to shallow ones rather quickly, as I flipped to the price tag for this “peace of mind.” $6 million. Flowcharts. Diagrams. Slides promising “enterprise-grade redundancy.” I could tell they expected easy approval. New CIO, big brand, fresh budget. My questions seemed to surprise him.

“Let me make sure I understand this,” I said. My signature phrase for “this makes no sense and I’m going to show you why.”

“You’re not proposing any way to ensure the site stays up, such as monitoring or actual resilience. Instead you’re proposing another data center with another instance of the website, that I would have the option to manually light up after being down for at least six hours. Is that correct?”

He didn’t flinch. “Julie, this is the gold standard in the industry. The biggest retailers use it. What you’re really buying is peace of mind.”

“That’s not prevention. That’s waiting to fail,” I said.

This reminded me of early in my career when a senior engineer told me, “Julie, let me put this in simple terms that you can understand.” I have more, shall we say, executive presence now than I did at 22, thankfully. I just smiled and let him continue, knowing that I would speak my truth soon. I didn’t need peace of mind. I needed accountability. And I knew that was something I needed to build, not buy.

“I appreciate the effort,” I said. “But six hours of downtime isn’t acceptable for a company growing this fast. We need proactive monitoring, real-time alerting, automatic recovery. If the site goes down, our guests shouldn’t even notice.”

The room went quiet. My infrastructure leads were listening as closely as the vendors. For years, they’d been trained to manage vendor relationships, not demand outcomes.

That meeting made one thing clear. We weren’t going to rebuild our foundation by buying more decks or deferring decisions. We had to put our hands back on the wheel. But I also knew owning everything wouldn’t fix anything if we didn’t know what we were building toward. That’s where vision stopped being a poster on the wall and became the thing that truly guided decisions.

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.

About the Author

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.