Joanne Sheppard is a strategic advisor to the Holzbrinck Group — the German family holding company behind Macmillan Publishers, Springer Nature, and Die Zeit — and a board member across several of its owned and invested companies. Her career spans publishing, M&A, and corporate strategy, and she brings an unusually wide lens to her work: graduate study in English literature, executive education in AI and innovation at MIT, positive psychology from Penn, and board governance through INSEAD.

In this conversation, we explore why AI adoption stalls inside large organisations — and why the answer has far less to do with technology than most leaders assume.

Things we will cover:

• Why AI adoption is fundamentally a change management problem, not a technology problem
• How to build the psychological safety that makes experimentation and upskilling possible
• What IKEA and JP Morgan can teach us about bringing employees along on the journey
• How to think about reinvesting the productivity AI frees up — and why that decision deserves a quarterly board conversation
• The architects, bridgers, and catalysts framework for understanding the role of leadership in driving adoption

From employee resistance to board-level strategy, Joanne draws on real experience inside a complex, decentralised organisation to offer one of the most grounded and human-centred perspectives on AI adoption you'll hear.

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