Carrie, thank you again for your time and walking me through your vision. Ahead of our next conversation, I would like to share a few stories from the recent transformation work I led and the lessons most relevant to Bond.
I look forward to diving deeper into these stories and discuss this role further with you on Thursday.
At KPMG, my transformation portfolio included Salesforce adoption, go-to-market campaigns, client feedback, commercial capability-building, and AI adoption. Across these initiatives, my focus was translating strategic ambition into sustained enterprise adoption: aligning leadership priorities, operating models, behaviours, and capabilities to modernize growth in a complex professional services environment.
At KPMG, one of the deeper cultural shifts behind the Salesforce transformation was redefining who participates in growth. During requirements gathering, I saw a clear divide: one third of the partners were highly resistant to Salesforce because they saw it as additional admin, while senior managers were eager to access the tool. From my proposal work, I knew senior managers wanted more exposure to business development because it gave them client-facing experience, commercial learning, and a stronger path toward partnership.
I reframed this to leadership as an untapped growth opportunity. If every person in the firm represents the brand in front of clients, commercial capability should not sit only with partners. Leadership agreed to pilot extended access for senior managers in selected business units.
The pilot worked: data quality improved, more opportunities were captured in the pipeline, and GTM campaigns increased 10x. The model became permanent and was extended more broadly. For me, it was satisfying to provide hundreds with more opportunities and see the sales culture become more inclusive.
The lesson I would bring to Bond and its clients: do not design transformation only around the most senior people. In a service business, everyone shapes the client experience and represents the brand. With the right tools, training, and permission, that broader employee base can become a powerful growth engine.
Two years before the Salesforce implementation, I helped the Head of Clients & Markets prepare the pitch to Management Committee. The initial case focused on the obvious business benefits: a 5% revenue uplift, stronger pipeline visibility, better cross-selling, etc. But the project was rejected by half of the Management Committee.
Initially, I struggled to understand why the pitch was not landing. The data points made sense to me. But these were highly experienced C-suite leaders; if they were pushing back, there was something I was not seeing. I worked through that with my professional coach, and it helped me reframe our value proposition. Partners were not simply resisting change. They were protecting something valuable: the client relationship, the trust built through time spent with clients, and the relationship-led model that had helped KPMG succeed for more than 150 years.
That changed the pitch. We moved away from “we need a better CRM” and toward “we need to modernize the firm to augment what already makes it successful.” Salesforce was not about replacing client time with admin. It was about giving the firm better infrastructure around those relationships: visibility, coordination, follow-through, and enterprise-wide growth.
My key learning was that change management is not about convincing people to abandon the past. It is about understanding what must be protected, then designing the future around it.
I came back from maternity leave in September 2023 and felt I was already late to AI. The technology was moving quickly, so I started learning and experimenting. I quickly realized that AI could not be treated like a standard technology rollout, and there was so much change ahead, I wasn’t that late in the game.
At KPMG, AI adoption had begun in a context of fear and ambiguity. My teams were already experimenting, often quietly, but did not feel they had permission. Employees worried about replacement. Leadership saw productivity and cost reduction potential. Risk teams were concerned about reputational exposure in a highly regulated environment.
My first step was to create permission with boundaries. I told the team explicitly that they were not being replaced by AI, showed them how I was using it and encouraged them to experiment. I worked with risk teams to create clear rules of engagement.
From there, we built capability through real work. I kept adoption business-led rather than IT-led. We moved from basic chatbot literacy to reusable prompts, shared agents, and more advanced AI workflows. To sustain adoption, AI became part of annual objectives, and I created a volunteer champion model where people could test, share, and scale practical use cases.
A major part of my role was also shifting the leadership narrative. AI was viewed as a tool to do the same work with fewer people. I tried to reframe it differently: why do the same with less, when you can do more with the same? The real opportunity was better quality, stronger compliance, faster delivery, more client insight, and get ahead of competition. I feel I was only partially successful in changing perspectives on AI, but still managed to retain the full team and increase the annual budget for AI from $150K to $500K.
The impact was tangible:
The bigger learning was that in the AI era, organizations and individuals need to rethink where value sits, how processes should be redesigned, and where human judgment and relationships still matter most.