Eka Kamushadze has spent 26 years leading transformation at Orange Business, through every wave of technology change.
Ask her what changed in that time and she'll list most of it. Ask what stayed the same and the answer is shorter - it's the human factor. Not as a soft skill or a nice-to-have, but as the thing that decides whether a transformation works at all.
Her diagnosis of why they fail is uncomfortably simple. People need to understand two things: why this is happening to the business, and what's in it for them personally. When either is missing, motivation goes, and no amount of technical execution compensates.
She has the counterexample to prove it. One tool she introduced met no resistance at all: universally, happily adopted. It surprised her enough that she went looking for the reason. There was genuine value in it for the employees. They didn't need convincing.
On AI, she's measured: the technology is new, the adoption challenge isn't.