Michele Grant

When two companies become one, or when an enterprise rewires how it works, governance is what people lean on when things go awry. This talk makes the case that governance is an architecture of trust rather than a calendar of meetings: decision rights that are explicit, risk reviews that happen before the risk matures, escalation paths that leaders actually use, and a cadence that survives the pressure of the first hundred days. Michele draws on a $30 billion media merger and a fifteen-country pharmaceutical integration to show which structures held, which were dropped for convenience, and what it cost. Attendees leave with a governance design they can stand up in the first two weeks of any program.

Most transformations declare victory at go-live. Value arrives only when people adopt the new way of working and keep it. Drawing on a multi-billion-dollar post-acquisition managed services transition and a $250 million synergy program for a private-equity-backed consumer goods merger, Michele shows how executives build change capability as an operating discipline rather than a communications plan: sponsor accountability, adoption measures that sit beside financial measures, the governance cadence that surfaces resistance early, and the sustainment model that holds after the program team leaves. Delivered as a case study with the artifacts leaders can reuse.

AI agents now complete tasks faster and in greater volume than people can. That change alters what an enterprise requires from its people. Judgment, relationship building and strategic synthesis become the skills an enterprise needs most. The enterprises that create value from AI redesign their work around those skills, with accountability and talent strategy updated to match. This session gives leaders three questions to assess the extent of an AI transformation. The first is whether leadership can state which work people now own. The second is whether decision rights have been redesigned across agent-executed, agent-supported and human-owned decisions. The third is whether talent strategy reflects that change. The session ends with an action any leader can take now: publishing a human work standard that lists the work the organization assigns to people, regardless of what AI can do.