Sarah Boyce and Alexander Titus will share a practical, CEO-level case study of building and implementing an enterprise AI transformation inside Avidity Biosciences. Rather than focusing on models, vendors, or the latest AI tools, the discussion will focus on what it actually takes to change how a biotech company works.
The central lesson is that AI transformation is fundamentally a people and organizational change effort. Technology can be purchased and deployed relatively quickly; changing behavior, building trust, redesigning workflows, creating new operating norms, and helping experienced scientists and operators work differently is the much larger job. A company can deploy every AI tool available and still be essentially the same company a year later.
Drawing on their experience together at Avidity, Sarah and Titus will discuss the transformation from complementary perspectives: the CEO creating permission, urgency, and organizational commitment, and the AI leader translating that mandate into changes in day-to-day work. Topics will include executive sponsorship and governance; creating clear permission for responsible experimentation; overcoming skepticism and resistance; building AI literacy and confidence across the workforce; using small wins and internal champions to create momentum; and moving from isolated productivity gains toward redesigned workflows and an increasingly AI-native organization.
The session will use concrete examples from the transformation, including teaching AI policy directly to employees until responsible use became organizational behavior, using real work rather than demonstrations to overcome resistance, and turning individual successes into distributed AI champions. At Avidity, for example, AI policy was taught personally to more than half the company rather than simply being issued as a document—because deployment without understanding does not produce adoption.
The takeaway for CEOs: becoming AI-native is not primarily an IT project. It is a leadership and change-management challenge. The technology is the catalyst; the organization is the transformation.