How business leaders can adopt a transformation mindset that goes beyond digital

One of the most important skills a modern business leader must master is the ability to effectively manage their existing business while making bold decisions that shape and secure the future of their organization. This is the art and science of balancing the pressures of delivering in today’s world with the need to transform in a rapidly changing digital world.

The hardest part of any transformation is the daily choices you make to set yourself up for future success. To navigate change, you must have the courage to let go of what worked in the past and make room for new skills, ways of working, partnerships, and opportunities.

With generative AI and machine learning rapidly reshaping how businesses operate, transformation is no longer just an aspiration but a necessity. Yet, many organizations still fall short because they confuse true transformation with digitalization.

While 99% of organizations report progress with generative AI , from defining use cases to actual deployment , many struggle to measure success and achieve ROI. In fact, 27% of leaders cite the high cost of AI deployment as a major challenge, highlighting the difficulty of achieving clear, measurable results.

Digital business transformation can mean reinventing your organization through cost-saving innovation or growth-oriented value creation. Either way, and ideally in combination, these approaches can increase operational agility and effectiveness, making a meaningful difference to customer experience, operational agility, and effectiveness.

Rather than simply digitizing what already exists, companies must rethink how they build and operate their organizations and evolve new products and services. The true importance of digital business transformation is becoming clear as more and more organizations realize that digital “add-on” strategies no longer work and that transformation is essential for their survival.

Consider Disney’s business. To realize its new business model, Disney disrupted the way it licensed, sold, and distributed its most important asset: content. It went beyond simply digitizing to address consumer demand for content, tackled the challenge of evolving new subscription streaming services typically associated with Netflix, and created experiences that reflected the Disney brand.

It fundamentally restructured its business, putting a single leader in charge of its direct-to-consumer distribution platform, technology, and international operations, integrating technology and data to deliver a more personal and improved user experience.

This is the mindset business leaders must adopt to succeed: it goes beyond incremental improvements, cost savings, and risk mitigation to delivering greater value.

In a competitive market, business leaders are often tempted to focus on quick wins and ROI-driven initiatives. While quick wins are important for demonstrating progress and maintaining momentum, they must be carefully aligned with a larger transformation roadmap to avoid compromising long-term goals.

Data shows that more than two-thirds of organizations have no success metrics for their AI initiatives , highlighting the importance of continually benchmarking progress against an organization’s long-term strategy.

For example, a business leader might deploy an AI-powered tool to optimize supply chain efficiency, achieving immediate cost savings and improved delivery times. Rather than treating this outcome as an isolated success, the leader positions it as a pilot within a broader strategy to fully digitize and automate supply chain operations. This approach helps ensure that short-term gains are not merely isolated results, but rather milestones toward achieving deeper transformation goals, such as increased resilience, scalability, and customer responsiveness.

Delivering immediate results while advancing long-term goals requires a delicate balance and poses a fundamental leadership challenge: how to maintain operational performance today while building the capabilities needed to succeed in the future.

This balance hinges on the ability to achieve what digital consulting firm Publicis Sapient calls “SPEED”—the five elements of strategy, product, experience, engineering, and data & AI—that work together to pave the way for successful transformation, allowing leaders to align their immediate actions with a broader vision and ultimate goals.

SPEED is more than just an acronym. By leveraging technology, organizations can rapidly realize real operational improvements. For example, Publicis Sapient used AI to reduce the time it took to implement a large-scale mainframe at a leading healthcare organization from 10 years to three years. The time savings reduce costs, improve operational performance, and build future-ready capabilities essential to success.

Truly successful transformation efforts are about people, not just systems and processes. Cultural change is key to any transformation effort, and employees need to be actively engaged and aligned with new business models.

More than 75% of European companies report that they are having difficulty finding employees with the technical and management skills related to AI, slowing down their digital transformation efforts as a result. This highlights the importance of upskilling within organizations and shows that it needs to be embedded in long-term transformation efforts. Leaders must therefore actively involve employees in the transformation journey. Resistance often stems from a lack of understanding or confidence. Engaging teams early and often helps foster trust and a sense of shared purpose.

Fostering a culture of continuous learning is essential. In this rapidly evolving environment, it is imperative to recognize that a critical skill is the ability to learn, relearn, and re-learn. As technology evolves, so must the skills and capabilities of employees.

Upskilling and reskilling efforts are important not only to empower employees, but also to ensure the organization is agile and responsive to change. Everyone must develop the ability to adapt and accept change as the only constant. While exponential change is inherently unsettling, we must also develop our capabilities to navigate it successfully.