高管团队必须面对的逆向转型需求

The Inverted TransformationImperative for the C-Suite How to lead AI change when you can’t keep up with it yourself For the firsttime in businesshistory, we are seeing something completely new: regular employees are usingnew AI technology faster than the companies they work for. This is not justanother technology that needs a quick fix. Instead, it completely changes howcompanies adopt new technology. In the past, new technology moved fromtop leaders down to workers. Now, it moves from everyday workers up toleadership. The center of change has shifted from the boardroom to employeechat channels and personal accounts. The “Shadow AI” phenomenon The evidence of this “Shadow AI” phenomenon is both overwhelming and vaguely terrifying. A staggering73.8 percentof workplace ChatGPT accounts belong not to the corporate domain but to personal emailaddresses circulating beneath official channels. Between March 2023 and March 2024, the corporate databeing fed into these unsanctioned AI tools exploded by 485 percent, a figure that would trigger a heartevent in any self-respecting CISO. “Individuals—human beingsboth in and outside ofbusiness—are adoptingAI quicker than can beembraced at the enterpriselevel. As leaders, we’verealized we’ve got avulnerability here.” AI technology is ahead of AI culture Meanwhile, the C-suite finds itself in the unfamiliar position of playing catch-up, like parents discovering theirteenagers have been throwing parties while they were away at management retreats. Leadership is dutifullydeveloping strategies, allocating budgets and commissioning consultants to develop upskilling roadmaps, yetCisco’s AI Readiness Index reveals an organizational culture unprepared for the revolution already occurring. Toby BoudreauxGlobal Vice President of DataEngineering at Publicis Sapient Only 9 percentof companies report being fullyprepared culturally for AI integration—a figure thatinspires approximately the same confidence as apaper umbrella in a hurricane. AI change management is... on thedecline? The statistics on AI change management are bleak: while 76 percent of organizations claim to have someform of AI change management plan (down from 79 percent last year), a mere 28 percent would describetheir plan as comprehensive. The remainder exist in various states of doneness—62 percent “in progress” and10 percent in “draft form,” which one suspects might translate to “someone mentioned it in a meeting once.” A ProSci Survey helpfully reminds us that only 1 in 8 projects with “poor change management programs” metor exceeded goals, a correlation that should surprise exactly no one. So how does the C-suite lead change management when adoption speeds have already leftorganizational readiness in the dust? In this strange new world, change cannot simply flow from the top like holy wisdom. Instead, we need bi-directional movement: leadership providing the guardrails, north star priorities and compliance frameworks,while simultaneously embracing (or at least acknowledging) the employee-driven knowledge and innovationalready transforming workflows at the bottom. What follows are insights from seven Publicis Sapient consulting veterans, who’s collective 150+ years ofexperience grants them the wisdom to navigate this particular corporate paradox. They explainhow each member of the C-suite is uniquely positioned to drive AI change management—or atminimum, prevent it from driving them into existential crisis. A Chief Executive Officer(CEO)who’s still relying on secondhand decks to grasp AI strategyis already behind—the only way to lead is to actually use the tools. For Chief Operations Officers(COOs), the priority isn’t crafting the perfect rollout plan—it’ssetting a focused direction so teams can experiment and learn quickly. Chief Information Officers(CIOs)are driving change in the most fragile part of the org,where legacy systems, data silos, and compliance worries collide—and they still have to deliverearly wins before anyone else can move. Chief Technical Officers(CTOs)need to stop measuring productivity by lines of code. AI ischanging how dev teams work—and what they’re even for. A Chief Marketing Officer(CMO)may have unified customer data, but until they align theteams behind it, AI will only reinforce the same old fragmentation. For Chief Financial Officers(CFOs)the math is changing fast—when AI can deliver outcomesin seconds, traditional billing models stop making sense. For Chief Experience Officers(CXOs), AI is already shaping every customer touchpoint, butunless you actively connect the dots across teams and channels, the experience will still feelcompletely disconnected. And the Chief Digital Officer(CDO)?Your job isn’t to evangelize AI—it’s to make it usable,safe and scalable for teams who don’t have time to wait. In this report The CEO:hands-on future-prooferThe COO:evolution orchestratorThe CIO:digital archaeologistThe CTO:AI-human partnership architectThe CFO:cautious commer