Julie Averill: ‘The job isn't about deploying technology anymore’
A conversation with author and former global CIO of Lululemon and REI Julie Averill on why leadership pitfalls doom business AI efforts
For years, Julie Averill led IT teams as chief information officer (CIO) of leading brands like Lululemon and REI. But today, she says “CIO” stands for something else: chief impact officer.
“The job is about driving culture and creating an environment where people can innovate at scale and feel safe saying, I don’t know,” she says.
Averill is now the founder and CEO of Gold Thread LLC, advising boards and the C-suite on AI-era leadership, and the author of “Chief Impact Officer: Real Transformation Comes from Human—Not Just Artificial—Intelligence.”
The Works caught up with Averill about the changing role of the CIO and where IT leaders go wrong when AI enters the org chart. The conversation has been edited lightly for clarity.
Your book reframes the CIO as ‘chief impact officer.’ Why is that rebrand important right now?
Julie Averill: Early in my career, an executive at Nordstrom told me IT was treated like the electrical closet. You go in when something breaks, flip the lights, rattle things around, then leave it alone. Since then, technology has become the key enabler of business strategy, from websites to omnichannel to AI. That's changed the CIO's role.
The CIO now has a rare vantage point across the whole company—shared only, really, with finance and HR—and must make hard calls about priorities. So, the job isn't about deploying technology anymore; technology is the easy part. It's about driving culture and creating an environment where people can innovate at scale and feel safe saying, I don’t know.
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That’s especially timely with AI, because so many people act as if AI alone would solve everything. It won’t. If you don't understand the business problem, you won't solve it with AI or anything else. Start with the business strategy, then figure out how technology serves it, not the other way around.
Is that part of the reason companies are getting stuck in pilot purgatory with AI?
The companies seeing real success aren't the ones declaring an "AI transformation" without defining what that means. They're the ones putting AI to work on specific problems, in the hands of the business and technology leaders closest to those problems. The pitfall is the rush to claim a transformation instead of treating AI like every other technology we've had to learn to use—as a tool to empower a business strategy that already exists.
The problems your business had before AI are still there, and if you throw AI at them without a strategy, you can make those problems more visible, or worse.
"The CIO now has a rare vantage point across the whole company."
What role should skills like empathy, trust-building, and authenticity play in helping teams navigate AI?
AI is a technology that a lot of people are genuinely afraid of. Research found that something like 44% of Gen Z employees said they’d sabotaged an AI initiative at their company because they felt threatened by it.
So, don’t lead with technology. Build trust with people first. That means being honest about what you know and don't know and inviting people into the conversation. We're not organizations of AI agents, and I don't think we're heading there. Humans are still in charge, and leaders need people to help drive the change, which means working as a team.
IT has had a brutal few years—a global pandemic, rush to enable remote work, now AI. Where does the CIO's mandate go from here?
The job of any IT leader got a lot more complicated. They’re closer to the business now, while also managing a genuinely complex set of challenges that all move quickly—cost pressures, cybersecurity threats, moving at real speed—all while helping the company evolve. The old model, where you scope a project and it takes nine months or a year to ship, is gone.
I think of the CIO as an innovator: flexible, culturally fluent, able to juggle a lot at once and prioritize ruthlessly. That's always been part of the job, it's just truer today.
You've described the CIO as almost an enterprise diplomat. What's the most important relationship a CIO can build across the business?
They need to cultivate all of them: customer experience, operations, international, finance, HR. The CIO needs to understand what matters to every business function and build a team that can solve their problems. They don't need to be the expert in every domain, but they need the relationship, so that when something changes in that space, IT is already at the table as a trusted partner.
