Episodes

70% of technology transformations fail. Not because of the technology, but because of the gap between what leaders deploy and what people actually do with it. In this compilation, host Donna P. Mitchell puts a year of the show's strongest answers side by side. Five leaders from five industries — consulting, behavioral science, mission-driven transformation, insurance and health, and product innovation — answer the same question in two rounds: what do organizations get wrong about technology ado...

70% of technology transformations fail. Not because of the technology, but because of the gap between what leaders buy and how people actually feel about using it. In this episode there is no guest. Host Donna P. Mitchell reads Chapter 3 of her book, Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap — on the emotional climate every organization carries into every deployment, and what it costs when no one accounts for it. A director's cynicism doesn't stay in the director's office. A physician's sk...

70% of technology transformations fail. Not because of the technology, but because of the gap between what leaders buy and how people actually use it. In this episode, host Donna P. Mitchell turns the lens to the builder's side. Instead of a product leader on the people side of adoption, she sits down with Maulik Bhatt, Tech Lead for Amazon Quick at AWS, who builds the core infrastructure behind Amazon's enterprise generative-AI assistant. He speaks the engineering; Donna translates it into wha...

Two realities exist inside every transformation. One lives in the boardroom — strategic, funded, on track, with a dashboard full of green check marks. The other lives on the ground floor, where the people who use the technology every day already know it isn't working the way the dashboard says. In this solo episode, Donna P. Mitchell reads and teaches from Chapter Two of her book, Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap — "What People Know." She unpacks why frontline intelligence flo...

70% of technology transformations fail. Not because of the technology, but because of the gap between the strategy and the people who have to live it. In this episode, Donna P. Mitchell sits down with Jürgen Dauk, author of the best-selling The Leadership Operating System and a former enterprise technology executive who led sales, operations, and business transformation across global companies including Oracle and Avaya. Jürgen has integrated multiple acquired SaaS companies into one coher...

70% of technology transformations fail. Not because of the technology, but because of the gap between a strategy set in the boardroom and the work that actually gets executed. In this episode, Donna P. Mitchell sits down with Noel Sobelman, Partner at Accel Management Group and author of Innovation Portfolio Management: Linking Strategy to Execution. For more than two decades, Noel has helped the world's largest enterprises, including Medtronic, BD, Siemens, Kimberly Clark, Honeywell, and Whi...

Most technology investments don’t fail because the technology is broken. They fail because leaders measure activity instead of outcomes — logins, usage, dashboards full of green — while the business itself never changes. In this episode, veteran operator Kurt Uhlir breaks down why that gap exists and how the best leaders close it. SUMMARY Donna P. Mitchell sits down with Kurt Uhlir — a CMO and operator behind an $880M IPO and 60+ funding rounds — to examine the difference between technology tha...

It was never the technology. In this solo author read, host Donna P. Mitchell reads Chapter 1 of her book Pivoting to Technology Adoption: Mind the Gap — the case for why 70% of technology transformations fail, and what the 30% do differently. Deployment is an event. Adoption is a process. The distance between them is where organizations lose millions and billions of dollars every year. Drawing on 49 years across five industries — from the Bell System to US Airways to Johnson & Johnson — Donn...

Technology is over-glorified in transformation. Change is not spoken enough. That's the message from Rohit C. Nambiar — former Group CEO of Tune Protect, now Co-Founder & COO of SabaiHealth — in this conversation about why most transformations fail before they even start. In this episode of Pivoting to Technology Adoption, Rohit C. Nambiar joins host Donna P. Mitchell to break down the simplicity trap — the pattern where leaders chase complexity, defer hard decisions, and lose sight of the...

System first. Tools second. That is the framework Greg Grand brings to AI sales leadership — and the reason most sales transformations fail. In this episode of Pivoting to Technology Adoption, Greg Grand — founder of G Squared Advisors and creator of the AI Sales Leader certification suite — joins host Donna P. Mitchell to break down why most executives are getting AI sales transformation wrong from the start. With 30 years of enterprise sales leadership including building the Google...

Most digital transformations fail at the people layer, not the technology layer. After 25+ years and 400+ clients, Dusty Gulleson, CEO of Tectonic, has seen the same pattern repeat: organizations start with the platform, force the processes and the people to follow, and watch the transformation collapse. In this episode of Pivoting to Technology Adoption, host Donna P. Mitchell sits down with Dusty Gulleson — CEO of Tectonic (formerly eResources), 25+ years of enterprise transformation leader...

Messaging is not the same thing as meaning. And until executives understand that, 70% of technology transformations will keep failing for the same reason. In this episode of Pivoting to Technology Adoption, host Donna P. Mitchell sits down with Will Leach — founder and CEO of Mindstate Group, behavioral science professor at SMU Cox School of Business, and bestselling author of Marketing to Mindstates — to expose what most CIOs, CTOs, and C-suite leaders miss when rolling out AI and enterprise...

The best system is not the most advanced one. It is the one your team will actually use. Host Donna P. Mitchell goes inside the MEST Africa AI Startup Program in Accra, Ghana — where 30 entrepreneurs from 7 West African nations are building AI companies with fewer resources than most US enterprises spend on a single pilot. Joined by Paul Crafer, Emily Fiagbedzi, Desmond Kwaku Coffie, and Chidinma Judith Akunwa this conversation challenges how executives think about adoption, talent, and...

In 2025, I said the AI adoption crisis would not be a technology problem. It would be a people problem. In 2026, BCG, McKinsey, MIT, and Gartner confirmed it with their own data. In this solo episode of Pivoting to Technology Adoption, host Donna P. Mitchell walks through the three calls she made in 2025 — and the independent data that confirmed every one of them. Then she names the three patterns she is watching for the next 12 months. TOPICS COVERED: • Why the 70% transformation failu...

Three financial services leaders. 77 combined years across fintech, insurance, and commercial banking. They have never met, never compared notes, and never coordinated a message. And they all arrived at the same conclusion: AI adoption in financial services fails when governance, people, and experience are treated as afterthoughts. In this compilation episode of Pivoting to Technology Adoption, host Donna P. Mitchell brings together the sharpest moments from three conversations that independe...

Adoption gaps are not technology problems. They are leadership gaps and experience gaps in disguise. In this episode, Bryant Richardson, ICMI Top 25 CX Thought Leader two years running, explains why organizations keep failing at transformation — and why the answer is not more training. TOPICS COVERED: • Why adoption gaps are really leadership gaps and experience gaps in disguise • The CRAFT Agilities Framework™ — the leadership system behind CX transformation • What a real enterprise...

70% of technology transformations fail. In this panel episode, two Oracle leaders explain why the AI adoption gap is widening — and what enterprises must fix before the next investment cycle. TOPICS COVERED: The adoption gap: why the technology works but organizations still fail The gap between boardroom AI strategy and ground-level execution Why LLMs need business context — and how data integration provides it Healthcare AI challenges: state-level compliance and data silos Co...

Why do 70% of technology transformations fail? Six experts. Six gaps. Mind the Gap. In this special compilation episode, Donna P. Mitchell brings together six of the sharpest voices from Pivoting to Technology Adoption to answer the question every C-suite executive is asking — and most are getting wrong. TOPICS COVERED: Shadow AI is already inside your company — and your best people are using it AI cannot be your strategy — AI is part of your strategy The banking CEO who asked the w...

Integration is not a back-end IT function — it is a business foundation. In this episode, Oracle's Pradyumna Kodgi explains why enterprises that skip integration strategy before adopting AI are setting themselves up for failure. WHAT'S COVERED: Why integration should be driven by business requirements, not technology How data silos are the biggest barrier to AI adoption Why healthcare has the most challenging integration landscape How agentic AI will transform healthc...

Why do 70% of enterprise AI transformations fail? Because organizations chase tools instead of strategy. In this episode, Donna P. Mitchell speaks with Rupali Kumbhani — Global Strategic Transformation Executive who has led enterprise-wide change at Revantage (Blackstone) and University of Chicago Medicine — about why the biggest barrier to AI adoption isn't the technology. It's leadership mindset, data readiness, and organizational trust. TOPICS COVERED: AI cannot be your strategy — AI i...

How does a news photojournalist covering crime scenes become a med tech storyteller funding nonprofit impact? In this episode, Donna P. Mitchell speaks with Jason Ellinger, Co-Founder of Beard & Bowler Productions, about how covering an 11-year-old's funeral made him rethink his entire career — and how his company now uses the HERO Grant model to fund nonprofit storytelling through corporate revenue. TOPICS COVERED: The StoryBrand 7-part formula: why you're the guide, not the hero How the HER...

The FREE AI governance framework most organizations don't know exists

Chris Majer has generated $4 BILLION in documented results for clients like Microsoft, Intel, and AT&T. Here's what executives keep getting wrong.

AI reduced FinTech development from 125 hours to 25 hours. But it will never replace commercial lenders. In this episode, Donna P. Mitchell speaks with Walt Postlewait — 30-year commercial banking veteran, CDFI leader who deployed $600M+ to underserved communities, and co-founder of Portfolio Watch — about why AI will transform some lending but never replace the human judgment required for commercial credit decisions. TOPICS COVERED: Vibe coding: how AI cut development from 125 hours to 25 hou...