How enterprises convert strategy into measurable value, without losing the human core
Insights from Avasant’s EBS26 (Empowering Beyond Summit 2026)
Every enterprise today has a vision for digital transformation. Most have an AI strategy. Many have invested heavily in technology, data platforms, and modernization programs. Yet few consistently convert those ambitions into measurable business value.
The challenge is no longer defining a destination. It is execution.
That reality was at the heart of a compelling discussion at Avasant’s Empowering Beyond Summit 2026 (EBS26) led by Anupam Govil, Managing Partner at Avasant and featuring Rashmi Kumar, SVP and Global Chief Information Officer at Medtronic, and Aayush Bhatnagar, Global Head of Customer Experience at Sysco.
At first glance, Medtronic and Sysco appear to have little in common. One develops life-saving medical technologies in highly regulated environments. The other operates one of the world’s largest food distribution networks, serving more than 730,000 kitchens. Yet both leaders described remarkably similar challenges: fragmented execution, disconnected processes, organizational silos, and increasing pressure to deliver outcomes amid constant disruption.
Their message was clear. Enterprise performance is no longer constrained by a lack of strategy. It is constrained by an inability to translate strategy into action at the point where value is created.
AI does not change this reality. It amplifies it. Organizations that deploy AI without addressing underlying process and organizational challenges often accelerate inefficiencies rather than eliminate them.
The winners in the AI era will not be those with the most ambitious visions or the largest technology budgets. They will be the enterprises that successfully combine human-centred leadership, end-to-end process excellence, and AI-powered decision-making into a single operating model.
One of the discussion’s most important observations came from Avasant Managing Partner Anupam Govil, who challenged the audience to rethink traditional outcome-based transformation models. As AI capabilities accelerate, organizations must avoid treating technology adoption as an end in itself. The objective is not simply higher productivity or faster execution. It is creating outcomes that improve business performance while strengthening the human experience.
From Avasant’s perspective, successful AI transformation requires balancing three objectives simultaneously:
This shift reframes transformation from a technology agenda into a leadership agenda. Organizations that optimize for efficiency alone often create unintended friction. Those that place humanity at the center of decision-making are more likely to achieve sustainable business outcomes.
This reflects a growing realization among enterprise leaders: sustainable outcomes require balancing business performance with human impact.
For Medtronic, every business decision ultimately connects to patient outcomes. The company must innovate, navigate complex regulatory environments, optimize supply chains, maintain quality standards, and expand access to healthcare.
Sysco faces a different challenge. A meal’s journey can begin more than two weeks before it reaches a customer. It may pass through dozens of systems and touch multiple stakeholders. Yet customers evaluate the experience through three simple expectations: on time, in full, and damage-free.
Both organizations operate in environments shaped by competing priorities:
Successfully navigating these requires a dynamic leadership mindset. Transformation can no longer be viewed as a technology initiative, it must be treated as an enterprise capability that integrates people, processes, and technology around a common purpose.
As Rashmi Kumar observed, “At the end of the day, why we exist here is to extend life, restore health, and to do that, we want to do it in an accessible way across the globe.”
This represents a significant shift from traditional transformation programs.
Traditionally, organizations focused on implementing systems, digitizing processes, and driving efficiency. Today, success depends on something more fundamental: creating operating models capable of continuously turning strategic intent into customer and business outcomes.
One of the most striking moments in the discussion came when the question was asked:
What is the biggest challenge in translating vision into outcomes?
The answer was blunt: “It’s us.”
Organizations frequently attribute transformation failures to legacy systems, market disruption, or employee resistance. While those factors matter, they are rarely the primary cause. More often, execution fails because leadership does not effectively translate strategy into operational reality. The moments that determine success rarely happen in the boardroom. They occur:
Aayush emphasized the importance of connecting strategy to frontline execution. He remarked, “The real magic is happening six levels below each one of you.”
This is where many organizations struggle. Leaders communicate vision effectively at the top but fail to connect it to role-specific actions throughout the organization. One reason is that teams often become protective of their own processes and responsibilities, making it harder to translate enterprise priorities into coordinated action. Rashmi puts it perfectly, “We have put way too many people across these processes who are holding on to their boundaries.”
Sysco’s approach offers an important lesson. Rather than stopping at purpose statements and corporate values, the company focuses on breaking strategy down into specific actions for individual roles. Employees understand not only what the organization is trying to achieve, but what they must do differently to achieve it.
This distinction is critical.
Execution fails less from lack of ambition and more from lack of translation.
This observation reinforces a broader Avasant perspective. The decisive moments in transformation do not occur in executive steering committees. They occur where value is created: during customer interactions, operational decisions, manufacturing processes, clinical workflows, and frontline service delivery.
As Anupam noted during the discussion, leadership teams often focus on defining vision while overlooking the challenge of ensuring that the vision survives six or seven layers of organizational translation. The organizations that outperform are those that systematically connect enterprise goals to frontline actions.
Moderating the discussion, Anupam Govil emphasized the importance of minimizing the distance between customers, frontline employees, and leadership teams. The conversation reinforced a reality Avasant frequently observes across transformation engagements: organizations that remain closest to their customers and operations make better decisions, adapt faster, and translate strategy into outcomes more effectively.
As organizations scale, layers of hierarchy, functional silos, and fragmented processes can create disconnects between strategic intent and operational reality. Customer feedback becomes filtered, frontline insights are diluted, and priorities lose clarity as they cascade through the organization.
Closing this gap requires deliberate focus on:
The panel repeatedly returned to this theme. Customers often identify friction before it appears in management reports, while frontline employees typically have the clearest view of where processes break down and where value is created. Organizations that systematically incorporate these insights into decision-making are better positioned to execute, innovate, and deliver lasting business outcomes..
Maintaining proximity to customers and frontline operations is especially important as organizations scale AI initiatives. Without this connection, AI risks optimizing isolated activities rather than improving enterprise outcomes.
This is one of the most common mistakes organizations are making with AI today.
Many enterprises deploy AI into isolated functions without redesigning the broader processes around them. One team becomes more efficient, but the overall workflow remains fragmented. The result is localized optimization rather than enterprise transformation.
A process may move faster at one stage only to encounter a bottleneck at the next.
Activities become automated, but customer experiences remain unchanged. Costs shift rather than disappear. Complexity simply moves from one area to another.
Adding AI to a single component may improve a specific activity, but enterprise performance improves only marginally if the underlying workflow remains fragmented.
As Bhatnagar succinctly stated, “Every AI ship must pass through the strait of process.” The most successful AI transformations begin with outcomes, redesign processes around those outcomes, and then apply AI to accelerate them.
While much of the AI conversation focuses on automation and efficiency, the discussion highlighted a far more valuable opportunity: expertise amplification.
One healthcare example described how advanced cardiac procedures rely on highly specialized experts who guide physicians through complex treatment decisions. These capabilities are scarce and difficult to scale. Rashmi framed the opportunity in terms that extend far beyond productivity gains, “We can really save millions of lives if the technology was there to enable us.”
AI presents an opportunity not simply to automate tasks, but to extend expert knowledge to more physicians, more locations, and ultimately more patients. This shift in perspective is important. The most transformative AI opportunities are not those that merely reduce labour. They are those that expand capability.
Across industries, the highest-value use cases tend to fall into four categories:
These use cases create outsized value because they improve organizational capacity, decision quality, and reach rather than simply eliminating effort.
The future of AI is not replacement. It is augmentation.
Organizations must manage risk, maintain compliance, protect operations, and navigate uncertainty. However, organizations that focus only on defence gradually become reactive. They protect today’s business while competitors build tomorrow’s.
Future-building organizations take a different path. They experiment continuously, learn quickly, leverage expertise from across ecosystems, and pursue transformational outcomes rather than incremental improvements. Most importantly, they embrace what Anupam described as 10X thinking rather than 10% improvement.
The discussion at EBS26 reinforced three convictions that Avasant consistently observes across its transformation engagements.
Technology will continue to improve prediction, speed, coordination, and efficiency. Humans will continue to provide judgment, trust, empathy, accountability, and purpose.
The challenge facing leaders today is not a shortage of ideas, technology, or ambition. It is the discipline to convert all three into repeatable outcomes where business actually happens: at the customer edge, within critical workflows, and in the human moments that ultimately determine success.
For Avasant, the conclusion is clear: in the age of AI, execution is no longer the final stage of strategy. Execution is the strategy.
Written by Ranjit Samal based on the 2026 Empowering Beyond Discussion Panel: From Vision to Outcomes: Navigating in an Everchanging World
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