The New York Times
Opinion · Guest Essay · August 3, 2026
I Helped Run Lululemon. Companies Need to Stop Kidding Themselves About A.I.
By Julie Averill, former Chief Information Officer, Lululemon
Read it at nytimes.com (opens in new tab)Resources
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Advisor Overview
Gain control of your entire IT estate. The core Advisor platform provides 360° IT lifecycle visibility — it unifies data, empowers strategic decisions, and enhances your workday.
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Cost Management
A defensible IT chargeback built on live device and location data, not an annual estimate. It categorizes every dollar by cost center, TBM tower, and cost pool, so every charge traces back to a purchase order and a device.
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Vendor Management
Full visibility into your enterprise vendors. It classifies every dollar of IT spend by manufacturer, reseller, and functional category, then shows you the overlap — what you paid for, which vendors have the same function, and when every renewal comes due.
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Application Management
Complete control over your application ecosystem. It starts from your spend, not your network — every application in the register is one you actually paid for, so the module has real value the day it's switched on, with nothing to install or configure.
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Cloud Consumption
A FinOps portal with full visibility into your multi-cloud spend. It normalizes provider dollars to FOCUS, the industry standard, so you can see what's driving spend, who owns it, where savings are hiding, and when every renewal or budget risk is about to hit.
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Lifecycle Management
The foundation of 360° IT lifecycle visibility. It reconciles purchasing records, asset inventory, entitlements, and contracts into one consolidated estate — every device, license, and contract tracked from purchase through retirement.
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AI Governance
Full visibility into AI spend across every provider. Built on FinOps, the open industry framework extended to AI, so you can see what's being spent and by whom, roll it up to the teams driving it, and catch runaway usage before it becomes a budget surprise.
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Telecom Management
A deterministic audit against every carrier invoice, run automatically inside the platform you already use. It reconciles what you're billed for against what you actually have, catching the rate creep, canceled lines, and duplicate charges a manual review misses.
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What We’re Reading… and Why
Why we’re sharing it
AI is a powerful technology. Here’s how to get it right.
In this New York Times guest essay, former Lululemon CIO Julie Averill explains why so many enterprise AI pilots stall out. The demos looked like magic, she writes, but “the tool wanted clean, connected data and decisions made in consistent, repeatable ways. Ours lived in a dozen systems that did not agree, layered with decades of exceptions and workarounds.” Comparing notes with other CIOs, she found the details changed and the ending rarely did: each “tried tools that dazzled in the demo and stalled the moment they hit the mess of a real, decades-old business.”
That gap is the problem Rubicon was built to close. Averill is clear that better models will not close it on their own — “what’s left is the part that was always ours: the slow, expensive work of cleaning up the messy data, complex human decisions and tangled systems.” The Advisor platform bridges the systems you already have — IT, finance, and supplier toolsets — and reconciles them into a single data set your teams can act on, with dedicated human advisors interpreting it alongside you rather than handing you one more dashboard. It is the reason we describe our solutions as AI informed and human managed.
We are posting it because we agree with where she lands: “A.I. is a genuinely powerful technology that still needs people, and putting it to use is slow, human work.” Better data comes first.
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Conversations with Rubicon
The questions finance, IT, and procurement teams bring us most often — answered in full.
Finance
Why do finance, IT, and procurement have different information for the same vendor, and how can they view a single data set?
Most legacy systems and protocols were designed so that IT, finance, and procurement teams tracked vendor details in different systems built for different jobs, which is why the same question about a vendor can produce three different sets of answers depending on who’s asked. At one time it made sense to split vendor management so finance managed the spend ledger, IT managed the asset inventory, and procurement managed the contract terms, but today disparate systems and mismatched data create dysfunction.Read moreShow less
Since the legacy systems and protocols in large organizations can be tough to rebuild completely, the solution is a platform that bridges the existing systems and reconciles the pieces of information therein into a single data set. When teams have a single source of truth and complete visibility into a vendor’s relationship at the enterprise level, they make better, more strategic decisions on what’s next.
How can our teams minimize AI sprawl, and what are best practices in proving AI ROI?
AI spend is originating in more places than most tracking systems can catch: unsanctioned purchases, usage-based features embedded in existing software, vendor contracts with automatic AI add-ons, and tools purchased independently across teams. This “AI sprawl” flourished because many companies developed mandates for teams to adopt AI and report utilization rates. The adoption rush spurred token maxing and sent utilization skyrocketing without clear data on value.Read moreShow less
AI ROI is even harder to prove than traditional tech profitability because usage-based pricing makes the cost structure volatile. When the investment itself keeps changing, the formula for determining return on that investment is never really accurate.
Best practices include a system that wrangles AI sprawl, identifies token usage value — not just flat token usage — and spots AI add-ons buried in standing vendor contracts. When the scope of enterprise AI is clear and the investment is accurately calculated, organizations have the financial discipline in place to formulate ROI.
IT
Why is IT shadow spend so common, and how can it be solved?
Gartner reported that 74 percent of IT purchases are funded all or in part by business units outside of IT, easily triggering shadow spend. With tech decisions flattening across the organization, the practical implications of IT-related decisions can get missed – and even become buyer’s remorse. Gartner also reports that the majority of enterprise tech purchases come with a “high degree of regret,” according to a 2022 survey.Read moreShow less
On top of decision fragmentation, legacy silos in large companies have inadvertently fostered shadow spend mechanisms like tools purchased on corporate cards but not centrally tracked, and duplicate systems purchased through line of business budgets but not routed through procurement. The solution is creating a single source of truth that catches and tracks all sources of IT spend across the entire enterprise, identifies spend at a functional level, and empowers teams to make strategic decisions with 360° visibility into their IT estate.
What should an IT asset management platform actually track?
A useful platform tracks more than a static list of what a company owns and instead provides insight into the entire lifecycle of IT assets across the enterprise. At a minimum, it needs a centralized inventory covering hardware, software, and SaaS licenses in one system of record; automated discovery that finds what’s actually running rather than relying on someone to log it manually; license utilization data showing which seats are active versus paid for but idle; and renewal dates tied directly to the underlying contract terms, not a separate calendar.Read moreShow less
The gap in most setups isn’t the inventory, as most companies have a list of vendors. The gap is connecting that list to usage and contract data so the list informs a strategic, data-informed decision: renew, renegotiate, downsize, or cut. Inventory without that connective layer is just a longer spreadsheet that becomes quickly outdated.
Procurement
Why do surprise tech and vendor renewals happen so often, and how can they be prevented?
Many vendor contracts are structured with the vendor’s own renewal cycle in mind, which may mean a limited client notice window, auto-renewal clauses that lock in the current term by default, and/or pricing that can step up or add new charges at renewal without a fresh negotiation. In other words, the onus of managing the renewal lands on the client company.Read moreShow less
Internally, surprises pop up from unintentional breaks across business units: procurement negotiated the contract terms, IT implemented the tool, and finance signed off on the budget outlay, but no one has full visibility into the renewal cycle. The fix isn’t expecting vendors to change how they structure renewals, the fix is using a system that identifies upcoming renewals 180 days out, giving teams time to vet whether the renewal is needed, and if so, time to renegotiate from a place of strength.
Typical spend reports show only what was already spent – how can they be updated to inform what to do next?
A typical spend report is an export from an accounting system: vendor names, dollar amounts, a total at the bottom. In other words, spend reports were built to track history, not offer insight into the future. The report can tell you a vendor invoiced $1.2 million last year, but not whether that’s competitive, when the contract is up for renewal, or whether another vendor contract exists in the same category.Read moreShow less
A spend report that informs the future tracks spend at the enterprise level, not just by department, and provides details on contracts approaching renewal within the next 180 days, categories where combined volume could mean better terms, and functional duplications that can be trimmed and repurposed into open budget. With the addition of human expertise to interpret the data in context of the company’s strategic plans, a spend report goes from static history to strategic leverage.
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