Catalyst 2025: Five themes that defined a year of transformation
‘It’s always been about the humans.’
This year on Catalyst, I sat down with around 50 incredible leaders, each with their own take on where we are collectively across technology, innovation, leadership and the human side of change. It was both a privilege and incredibly enlightening.
Some moments stood out because they captured ideas that kept surfacing again and again, regardless of industry or role.
Like when the Chief Information and Strategy Officer at National Life Group, Nimesh Mehta, told me the biggest mistake technologists make is not enrolling people as part of the change.
“You have to land WITH people, rather than land ON them.”
That line stuck with me because it reflects what so many of these conversations reinforced: transformation falters when we forget the humans at the center of it.
It felt like the right moment to step back and reflect on what I kept hearing again and again from these leaders. These are the five themes that kept showing up on Catalyst in 2025.
1. The human side of AI: Trust, fear and the work ahead
Just like the early internet, much enterprise AI development has so far been experimental, undefined and chaotic. The now-famous MIT study showing 95% of AI pilots failing was a much-needed reality check.
CEO of the AI Leadership Institute, Noelle Russell, spent years selling Microsoft AI back when executives had no idea what she was talking about. She issued a warning about naively handing everything over to AI, saying:
“Not only will it do the stuff you love, but it’ll do the stuff you love in a mediocre way that you’ll eventually resent.”
AI has no judgment about what’s appropriate to surface or scale. It will amplify whatever we give it. That puts the responsibility for boundaries squarely on us.
And that same responsibility shows up in leadership: we have to design the conditions and guardrails for how people and tools operate.
As JessicaHartley at JPMorganChase shared with me, “At some point in leadership, you have to trust that you do not know everything, and your team is smarter than you.Your job is to build the platform, build the space, and make the connections so they can do the work.”
When I talk about the human side of AI, these conversations reinforce that people are afraid of losing control, losing creativity and having tools forced on them without understanding the impact. That’s why AI transformation is, at its core, a people transformation.
For Jamie Sermon,VP of Engineering Robotics and Automation at UPS, that fear is ill-informed.“We’re not taking away any jobs,” he says, “we’re changing the way work is done.”
2. Authentic leadership: Courage, transparency and showing up as your whole self
Brant Beard, CEO of ELEVATE consulting, talked about saying yes before he was ready and then immediately feeling the fear that follows.
That moment of “Oh crap. I’m going to fail” resonated with me because it’s honest about where courage actually shows up. Not after confidence, but before it.
He was clear that the voice telling you that you do not belong never fully goes away. You learn to quiet it enough to keep moving, stay present, and focus on what you’re actually good at, instead of trying to be someone you’re not.
Donald Chesnut is another of the most thoughtful leaders on courage and transparency. He spent over 20 years as Chief Experience Officer at companies like Mastercard and General Motors and described walking into rooms as the only openly gay man among 50 people and having to imagine what that’s like for people of other backgrounds. Only when he brought his full self to work could he finally focus on his talent and creativity instead of managing how he would be perceived.
Donald also shared failures in town halls, his personal shortcomings and times he could have done better.
“Being truly open about your own shortcomings leaves room for other people to be truly open,” he said.
3. Designing with people, not just for them
When I talk about designing with people, not just for them, I’m really talking about intention. This is how we make deliberate choices about when technology steps in and when humans matter most.
Donald Chesnut articulated this perfectly when he described the balance as a choice, not an accident. “It’s digitally human and deliberately human,” he said. The point isn’t automation for its own sake. It’s knowing when people actually need people.
That mindset shows up in how Donald thinks about customer-centered growth. He starts with loyalty, trust and care, and then works backward to the systems that support them. Growth follows, but it’s not the first move. The human experience comes first.
I heard the same instinct in how Jessica Hartley talks about leadership and culture. She’s arguing for environments where people don’t have to perform a version of themselves just to belong. Where they can do their best work because the space was designed with real humans in mind.
For me, this is the real shift I’ve been seeing. Designing with people means recognizing that products, platforms and workplaces all shape behavior. And when we’re deliberate about that design, we create conditions where people and businesses perform better.
Sean Jantzen, VP of Applications Development at UPS, captured the “with, not for” mindset in a way that feels especially true inside complex enterprises:
“To me, it’s a partnership, and it has to be a partnership, otherwise it’s not going to be successful… there’ll be just a lot of finger pointing going on.”
And I love that, because it's how you build the relationship that makes outcomes possible.
4. Reinventing work: Skills, teaming and new ways of thinking
Jamie Sermon gave me one of the clearest blueprints I heard all year for how work actually gets reinvented. It’s one person, one team and one risk at a time.
- As leaders, he said, we have to “create a safe space for our teams,” and we do that by making sure people aren’t alone when they hit something they’ve never seen before.
- He also reframed experimentation in a way that actually works inside big organizations: you can’t ask people to take risks if they think they’ll get punished for it.
- His mindset was simple: “We took the risk, so we’re going to make mistakes… what can we learn from this?” And then you move forward together.
And his colleague Sean Jantzen brought the operational lens of reinvention, a.k.a. how teams shift from big-bang perfection to incremental learning. He talked about moving away from “polishing that apple until there’s immediate perfection,” and leaning into “smaller batch size deployments” where “the blast radius is smaller.”
That changes how teams work together in very real ways.
5. Technology as possibility
What struck me this year is how small the gap has become between what’s possible and what’s real.
Back in her Microsoft days, Noelle Russell felt like she was “selling vegetables to kids,” but now, rolling out tools can be done in days; the real constraint is imagination and clarity of vision. “It’s going to be the great equalizer. You do not have to be technical,” she told me. “It makes the ideation your superpower, not necessarily the model that anyone can go use.”
Deanna Steele, CIO at Allied Universal, reinforced that what makes possibility real is the discipline of stepping back and asking if you’re still aligned. She said, “sometimes it's important to take a step back and say, okay, am I still being true to what I intended to do?” And she named something I think a lot of leaders forget in fast-moving moments: “there is no magic book of best practices… there’s no book… we make them up as we go along.”
Kainoa Horcajo, cultural consultant and storyteller, took this one step further by reminding me that possibility without meaning is just noise.
“You can circle words like you're doing a wine tasting… integrity, accountability, empathy, but without the story, that’s what adds the flavor.”
And he said something I keep coming back to in this AI moment: sometimes, just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.
The technology exists, and it can be our superpower. The question is whether we can imagine clearly enough to use it well.
Catalyst returns in 2026
After spending a year inside these conversations, I’m very aware that we have so much more to talk about. Catalyst will still be talking all things AI, innovation and humanity in 2026, because we are still in the messy middle of the AI transformation, and this technology is moving faster than we can fully grasp. Until then, be bold, take risks and shine bright.
