- Implementing AI: What It Takes to Transform an Organization -
a conversation with Charlie Laurie
Most companies we talk to are implementing AI without a roadmap. The licenses are bought, a few pilots have run, and there is no route from any of that to something that changes the business. That is a reasonable place to have landed. We were all told 2025 would be the year of the agent, and it wasn't. Until this February the tools did not carry a piece of complex work end-to-end. Nearly every AI program in this industry was scoped in that old world.
Charlie Laurie started two years ago anyway. He sold it internally as the intentional path, because the fast one would not scale, and spent the first phases on master data work that showed nothing for months. That timing and foresight has put his commercial teams on the AI front end now.
On Tuesday, October 13th, he joins us for the next Executive Roundtable: Implementing AI: What It Takes to Transform an Organization. Charlie is Chief Innovation Officer at Palmer Holland, a specialty chemicals and ingredients distributor, and he has agreed to talk about the program while it's still unfinished, including the parts that have not gone the way he planned.
What we'll get into
- Where a program like this has to start, and why the first phases may not look like AI at all
- How you sell a multi-year AI vision that the operating staff actually buys into
- What you're building toward if efficiency is only a milestone, and what that does to the org chart
- How good the tool has to be before an experienced seller will touch it
Who should be in the room
- BU and division leaders in chemicals, distribution, and adjacent materials businesses who own a P&L and are being asked what the AI spend will produce
- Commercial and sales leaders whose adoption stalled somewhere between the pilot and the field
- Innovation and technology leaders carrying a multi-year program and the change management that comes with it
Event details
Tuesday, October 13, 2026. 9:00 AM ET / 8:00 AM CT. 60 minutes.
Charlie Laurie
Guest Speaker
Chief Innovation Officer, Palmer Holland
Charlie Laurie is Chief Innovation Officer at Palmer Holland, where he is roughly two years into a seven-phase data and AI program running through 2027. It started with product master data, moved through a lakehouse and analytics, and now puts a fully capable AI agent in front of the commercial teams. Somewhere in the middle of that, he learned that the harder problem is not building the thing. It is what happens after you show people a picture of the future and then hand them the first version of it. He is unusually candid about that part.
Most of what gets shared about AI transformation is the finished version. This one is still in progress, which is the best kind to learn from.