Andrea Iorio is a renowned leadership speaker, celebrated for helping global organisations navigate the digital frontier.
With a track record spanning roles as Tinder’s Latin America head, Chief Digital Officer at L’Oréal Brazil, podcaster for NVIDIA Brazil, columnist at MIT Technology Review Brazil, and author of Meta-Leadership and Metanoia Lab, he brings a rare combination of real-world leadership and visionary insight.
In this exclusive interview with Champions Speakers Agency, Iorio reveals the human-centric mindset that underpins successful technology adoption—from championing the invisible forces of “anti-fragile” leadership, to embracing soft skills in an AI world, to redefining marketing in a Web3 era.
If you’re ready to lead beyond the curve, you’ll gain invaluable ideas from one of today’s foremost thinkers on digital transformation.
Q: When organisations look to embrace new technologies, what do you see as the most pressing challenges they must overcome?
Andrea Iorio: Well, first of all, new technologies always bring about lots of advantages to businesses, but also lots of challenges. Some of the main ones include, first of all, the problem related to the lack of digital literacy when it comes to the teams that adopt these technologies.
As much as with calculators in the 80s, as much as with AI today, outcomes are very different through the use of technology depending on how much people who are using it are able to prompt them better, use better data, and so on. Whenever we look at the budgets going to new technologies in companies, usually 90% goes to the tech itself and just 10% goes to training and empowering people to better use these technologies.
The first point here is that we focus so much on rolling out the latest technologies, but we don’t focus enough on preparing people to use them, which brings us to a second big point – people’s resistance to new technologies, mainly for fear of substitution. If teams do not really understand or grasp the potential benefits of the technology but just see that these technologies are more efficient and productive than themselves, human beings, they will, of course, resist them. Resistance can take many forms – just lack of usage is one form of resistance. If people don’t understand its benefits, they won’t use them.
A third one we see very often is the rollout of new technologies not aligned with the company’s pain points. What I mean by that is we often see companies adopting new technologies because it’s fashionable – because everybody talks about AI or large language models or many different tools for automation and data analysis – but we don’t see them as really focused or aligned with the core business.
We roll out these technologies, they’re scattered across the company, they’re just individual projects that still do not really merge with the company’s pain points. I think these are some of the biggest challenges, but definitely, there are many more.
Q: In your view, what leadership principles are critical for guiding teams and businesses to thrive in today’s fast-moving digital era?
Andrea Iorio: I recently published a book on this – exactly on the skill set needed in the age of AI. My book is called Meta Leadership, so I’ll name a few of these leadership principles.
The first one I call reperception. Since the external world is changing at an exponential rate – actually faster than the one we were used to during the age of the internet – leaders need the ability to update their vision of their business, their market, and eventually the world in the face of external changes. Perception is traditionally the ability to see novelty and make decisions based on it, but reperception is about giving up our past vision of the world because it changes so fast.
A second principle is what I call data sensemaking. This is not only about having analytical skills and the highest IQ to crunch data, but also the ability to use AI tools to do that and then focus on picking the right KPIs, letting AI crunch the data. Picking new KPIs – such as correlations between metrics – can lead to novel insights and competitive advantage.
The third leadership principle is trust. Most employees in organisations do not trust or would not trust an AI leader, and that’s logical – humans are the only ones able to establish trust. Trust can be built through vulnerability, reciprocation, and other specifically human mechanisms, and it cannot be substituted by technology.
Q: As the workplace continues to evolve alongside AI, which soft skills should professionals focus on developing to stay competitive?
Andrea Iorio: This is a great point, because soft skills are more and more important in the workplace. Two years ago, I ran a survey with 247 HR leaders, asking whether they would rather hire someone with great hard skills but no soft skills, or great soft skills and no hard skills.
A staggering 93% said they would rather hire the second candidate. That shocked me, because I grew up in a world that prioritised hard skills. The reason is twofold: hard skills are easier to teach than soft skills, and AI tools are already outperforming humans in many hard skills – coding faster, learning faster, accessing more knowledge – but they can’t replicate soft skills.
Soft skills are important because they’re unsubstitutable and represent the competitive advantage humans have in the workplace. Some of the most important include:
- Critical thinking – looking at things from different perspectives, questioning the status quo, and thinking outside the box.
- Adaptability – being able to adjust in an ever-evolving marketplace.
- Vulnerability – which is essential for building trust, one of the most important leadership principles in the age of AI.
Q: Digital transformation impacts industries in different ways. How do you see its effects varying between sectors, and where do you believe the greatest opportunities lie?
Andrea Iorio: Digital transformation is a term used for many technologies and the impact they have on businesses, but we need to differentiate their impact. Usually, adoption starts in B2C sectors because they’re closest to the end consumer, and change in demand always starts from the consumer.
Sectors like retail, banking, or financial services typically adopt new technologies earlier than B2B sectors like mining or pharma. But interestingly, the biggest impact of digital transformation lies in B2B sectors. Early adopters there gain the most competitive advantage because these sectors are slower to change – when they do transform, the effect is huge.
There’s a Deloitte report from Australia called Long Fuse, Big Bang, which explains that B2B sectors take longer to accelerate digital transformation, but the eventual impact is often bigger than in B2C sectors.
This exclusive interview with Andrea Iorio was conducted by Mark Matthews of The Motivational Speakers Agency.
