Thank You Julie Averill
Discovering insights about your company
Women’s voices get drowned out in the business press. This NYT Op Ed by Julie Averill deserves our time because what she’s calling out could be happening to or around you.
On August 3rd, Julie Averill (former Chief Information Officer at Lululemon, 30 years in technology) published an op-ed in the New York Times titled “Companies Are Faking It With A.I. And Workers Are Paying the Price.”
She wasn’t writing about women. She was writing about companies.
And yet almost every paragraph touched something that directly affects you. Her indictments are valid, she brings the receipts and the piece deserve more than one news cycle.
Indictment One: AI is being used as a substitute for strategy
When a company sticks “A.I.” in a title, a news release, an earnings call or a product name without the strategy to back it up, the abbreviation costs nothing and produces nothing. Worse: it actively misleads boards, investors and employees about what is actually being built.
Averill goes further. AI spend has become cover for poor management — a rationale that sounds visionary and deflects accountability. Leaders who couldn’t demonstrate strategic thinking before ChatGPT arrived haven’t developed it since. They’ve found a more expensive way to avoid it.
The business, financial and strategic acumen gap doesn’t disappear at the top of the org chart. It shows up there too.
Indictment Two: The AI that doesn’t know your business
Averill describes a vendor with extraordinary promises — AI that could answer any question about the company, predict years of sales, identify waste, optimize operations. When her team finally sat down with them, the vendor didn’t ask a single question. Not about their data, their systems or how they actually worked.
Ninety-five percent of enterprise generative AI pilots never deliver real results, she cites. The tools want clean, connected data and consistent, repeatable decisions. Real businesses run on decades of exceptions, workarounds and contextual judgment that lives nowhere in a database.
An AI that doesn’t know your business can’t help your business. That’s a design failure.
Indictment Three: The relational mind is what the tool can’t see
This is the passage that tugs at the heartstrings:
She wasn’t a cost to be optimized. She was the person who knew why the numbers looked the way they did, the very context no tool could see.
This is Julie’s empathy proudly on display. A real person gave two decades to a company that let her go in a short meeting and called it efficiency. Her work didn’t disappear - it shifted onto the people who stayed, who then wondered if they were next.
That woman held knowledge that wasn’t in any system. It was contextual, relational, exception-aware. It was the kind of knowing that doesn’t fit a linear interface or a clean data set. The AI couldn’t see it. The company couldn’t name it. So they priced it at zero.
Indictment Four: The AI layoff that isn’t
Companies announce efficiency. The efficiency doesn’t exist yet. A third of the roles cut for AI reasons get rehired within months because the work was eliminated before anyone redesigned how it would be done.
The people pushed out in the meantime are more than head count. They represent institutional knowledge, relationship context and judgment being dismantled. Some were asked to train the tools meant to replace them before they left. Inhumane.
Averill calls this the most tragic version of AI washing. It is also one of the most reliable mechanisms for removing experienced people (read more expensive) from organizations under a cover story that sounds like progress.
What you do with this
These aren’t distant corporate problems. If you work inside an organization deploying AI or being told AI has made your role redundant, Averill’s indictments are a map of what may actually be happening around you.
The relational mind articles in this publication name what Indictments Two and Three are pointing at. Your Business Savvy Coach exists because generic AI doesn’t know your business - so there’s one here that does, built around the frameworks that have guided this work. And Built Without You takes on the architecture of AI bias itself.
Julie Averill wrote the indictments from inside three decades of corporate technology leadership. Now you can more clearly see what you’re navigating.
What’s a Woman to Do?
Read Julie Averill’s op-ed in the New York Times. It’s worth a full read.
Notice which of her four indictments describes your organization right now.
If you’re the woman who knows why the numbers look the way they do, name that knowledge before someone calls it a cost. It might be just what AI calls for now.
Explore Your Business Savvy Coach. It’s the AI that actually asks the questions and gives you a full business brief to work from. Coming 8 Sept.
Lead ON!
Susan
If you’re following all the advice and it still feels like something’s in the way, I’m telling you, you are not the problem. You are working inside a system that’s withholding something from you. And now AI is making it permanent.
I’m here to offer what that system and embedded AI won’t and can’t: the business, financial and strategic acumen that keeps you visible and opens doors. I do that through the complete 6-part ecosystem that is being built for you here.
❤️ Please like, share or restack this post — it’s the best way to help other women find it
📘 Explore the ecosystem:
Your Business Savvy Coach - the only AI tool that coaches you on developing and demonstrating your business savvy as you engage with it on projects, pitches and priorities. Its Coaching Integrity layer guards against the embedded bias that generic AI tools carry in unchecked.
Built Without You: How AI is Hardening the Glass Ceiling and What to Do About It
The AI Intercept Pack - tool for working efficiently with AI while guarding against its embedded biases. (coming soon)
They Never Told You There Was a Horse in the Barn: The Business Savvy They Never Taught You. Why It Changes How You Work and How Far You Go
Be Business Savvy Course - self-paced, online course equipping you with the business, financial and strategic acumen skills you need to succeed and outrun the ways AI is hardening the glass ceiling.
Be Business Savvy articles here on Substack.