Today, many enterprises grapple with how to turn AI experimentation into measurable outcomes. This puts CIOs under pressure to show tangible results while building trust across the organization.
But unlike past technical waves that came with years of anticipation — from the Internet to the smartphone — AI arrived on the scene practically overnight.
That speed, combined with job insecurity and collective uncertainty, can create a perfect storm of fear across the workforce. For success, IT and business leaders must address the fear proactively and not just hope employees come along for the ride. This means not just communicating the outcomes leadership wants to see but also allowing employees to generate their own ways of doing things and then recognizing those workers for their accomplishments.
Kerry Brown, Transformation Evangelist at Celonis, emphasizes the importance of an empathetic approach as companies deploy AI. “Being able to connect with people in a way that they don’t feel threatened, that they have shared ownership in deciding where you go, means that AI becomes that helpful piece, versus a combative competitor to employees,” says Brown.
That shared ownership has a natural home — and millennials are already stepping into it. In its 2025 “Superagency in the Workplace” report, McKinsey suggests that C-suite leaders can count on millennials to lead the way. Some 62% of 35- to 44-year-old employees indicate high levels of expertise with AI. Millennials are today’s rising managers and team leaders, making them natural champions of a transformation culture.
Where technology meets trust
AI is one of the largest technology investments enterprise leaders can make, raising the stakes for successful implementations with measurable ROI. But just 5% of integrated AI pilots are delivering a return. The vast majority see no measurable P&L impact, according to the MIT “State of AI in Business 2025” report.
The barrier to its adoption isn’t always AI’s access to data; it’s often that the systems businesses run on were never engineered to work together. From ERP to CRM, manufacturing systems and beyond, tech stacks are both complex and disconnected. Widely deploying AI solutions in these environments without context for how technologies are used, how and why they’re supposed to be used, is setting up AI tools to fail.
The Celonis Platform provides AI with the contextual connections between these siloed systems and data sources, offering a shared, objective, and real-time view of how the business actually runs. For CIOs, having a shared source of truth for any transformation can help nip conflict in the bud and foster collaboration. This way, employees can base their decisions or form their opinions using objective facts, rather than on cobbled-together instincts or partially informed ideas.
CIOs can take the lead by helping teams find and agree on where AI would be most useful and valuable and then monitor how deployment is going. Both these factors together drive AI success and reduce friction and fear through greater transparency.
“When you look at the kind of facts that can be provided with Celonis [and] the accessibility of that information, we gain understanding for really measurable outcomes that’s giving everyone a win at an individual team or strategic leadership level,” says Brown.
Blueprint for team-driven AI transformation
Vinmar, a global distributor of plastics and chemicals, is a leading example of a positive transformation culture. With 1,500 employees and $4B in revenue, the company’s CEO Vishal Goradia has an ambitious goal: To be the most technology-forward plastics distributor in the world.
Transformation is exciting but often also includes resistance. Goradia believes that companies can help employees feel less fearful about change by addressing concerns head on and emphasizing the day-to-day benefits they’ll gain. “You approach [resistance] by solving a problem for the employee,” says Goradia. “For us, AI automation is not about replacing people’s jobs — it’s about making those jobs better.”
As part of this approach, Vinmar relies on Celonis as the foundation for its automation and AI strategy. In one project alone, the company saw a 40% productivity improvement for its supply chain team, meaning each individual can handle 40% more orders than before. In turn, this enables an organic growth pipeline which could be as high as 33% over the next 24 months.
Goradia offers this advice for success: “Our approach is getting team input. We want AI to be a collaborative, value-added tool for our employees because fundamentally people will not adopt something unless it’s useful,” he says. “We are going to improve our process, we are going to deploy technology, and we want to do it in a constructive and collaborative way.” This demands a shared vision, which Goradia sees as an essential element when implementing something internally.
The bottom line
There’s an urgency to deploy AI quickly. But the organizations that see real ROI aren’t necessarily those that deploy faster; they’re the ones who bring their people along with them. The Celonis Platform provides the shared visibility and measurable outcomes that turn that alignment from intention into execution, helping build a foundation for transformation-friendly cultures.
To learn more about enabling Enterprise AI at scale, download the free e-book.