Artificial Intelligence transformation leaders are redefining how modern businesses operate, innovate, and compete. These visionaries, spanning executives, technologists, and data strategists, are not merely implementing AI tools; they are reshaping entire corporate ecosystems. One such visionary leader is Jessica Minghinelli, Director, Operational Excellence & AI Transformation. When reflecting on her dynamic career across industry giants such as Xerox, Google, and Salesforce, she highlighted how each chapter has uniquely shaped her philosophy on operations, leadership, and innovation, evolving from operational discipline to digital agility and ultimately to strategic transformation.
At Xerox, she built a strong foundation in operational excellence, mastering Lean Six Sigma, Systems Thinking, and ITIL principles to drive measurable and sustainable outcomes across large-scale environments. This experience instilled in her a belief that structure, discipline, and operational rigour form the bedrock upon which innovation can thrive. To her, efficiency extends beyond speed; it is about creating intelligent, repeatable systems that empower people to perform at their best.
Her tenure at Google deepened her understanding of how to scale creativity within an ecosystem defined by experimentation, data, and hypergrowth. She observed that structure and innovation can not only coexist but also reinforce one another. Jessica believes the most effective operations are those that are almost invisible, seamlessly supporting creativity and connection without becoming a constraint.
Over her nine years at Salesforce, Jessica’s leadership in global operational transformation marked her most profound evolution. She witnessed how technology, when infused with empathy and purpose, can elevate both efficiency and the human experience. Through initiatives that embed automation and intelligence into core operations, her focus remained on culture, ensuring that innovation strengthened trust, transparency, and inclusion.
Collectively, these experiences have shaped her conviction that the future of operational excellence is not purely digital but deeply human. She believes that tomorrow’s leaders will be those who translate data into empathy, automation into empowerment, and innovation into enduring cultural value.
She shares, “My leadership philosophy recognises that true operational excellence leadership lies in the balance – structure with innovation and data with empathy.”
Empathic Intelligence
In her role leading Global Operations and AI Transformation, Jessica defines human-centred, data-driven service excellence as the intersection of empathy and insight where operational design respects human emotion while being guided by intelligent data. To her, true service excellence begins with understanding people, employees, partners, customers, and users and building processes, programs, and technologies around their real behaviors and needs.
In practice, this approach starts with voice-of-customer analysis and journey mapping to identify pain points and critical moments that define the experience. It then evolves into a cycle of experimentation, blending qualitative understanding with quantitative intelligence such as predictive routing that matches the right experts to specific cases. Automation and AI-driven decisions are always supported by human-in-the-loop mechanisms and defined escalation paths, ensuring judgment and empathy remain at the core.
Operationalising this vision involves equipping teams with role-specific tools, dashboards, and playbooks, while tracking a balanced set of KPIs, including CSAT, NPS, first-contact resolution, and cost-to-serve.
In 2024, Jessica’s teams deployed multiple Robotic Process Automations (RPAs) that generated the equivalent of 8.5 FTEs in recurring capacity redeployed toward higher-value, complex work, resulting in stronger SLA compliance, customer satisfaction, and OKR achievement.
Her philosophy is clear: human-centered automation transforms capacity into capability. When designed intentionally, data and automation amplify rather than replace the human element, enabling people to solve complex problems, anticipate needs, and deliver experiences that build trust.
Global Leadership Resilience
When asked about the strategies she relies on to foster resilience, collaboration, and adaptability within global teams, Jessica emphasizes that effective global collaboration must transcend time zones, cultures, and communication barriers. She believes resilient teams thrive on clarity, trust, shared purpose, and the transparency and direction that strong leadership provides, especially during periods of change and uncertainty.
Her approach is grounded in three core pillars:
- One Team Mindset & Psychological Safety
Jessica views a truly global team as one united by purpose, not proximity. She intentionally cultivates inclusion across geographies, ensuring that every voice is valued and that team members are encouraged to surface risks and challenge existing norms. This culture of openness fosters confidence and shared accountability, even in high-pressure environments. - Asynchronous Collaboration for Scalable Connection
She champions the strategic use of asynchronous collaboration tools to minimize meeting fatigue, respect diverse time zones, and accelerate decision-making. This approach ensures that knowledge is captured, accessible, and easily transferred, sustaining momentum without causing burnout. - Standardised Work, Localised Execution
According to Jessica, the challenge in global operations lies not in distance but in variability. Standardized processes, supported by clear governance and local flexibility, create resilience and agility. Through agile capability mapping, her teams can swiftly realign around new priorities or disruptions.
During her tenure as Global Director of Partner Operations at Salesforce, these strategies resulted in a 17% resource optimization while maintaining full performance, demonstrating how resilience and adaptability reinforce each other in practice.
Purposeful Innovation
When discussing the integration of agentic AI and automation, Jessica emphasizes that true technological transformation must remain anchored in human creativity, empathy, and purpose. She believes that while AI can drive precision and efficiency, it delivers lasting value only when it amplifies what makes humans unique—their imagination, compassion, and intent.
She adds, “Sustainable transformation begins when machine precision meets human intention.”
Every automation initiative begins with a clear sense of purpose—why it exists, who it serves, and how it enhances people’s work.
At Salesforce, for instance, when introducing Agentic AI for Partnership Letters, she intentionally limited the initial deployment to the Public Sector. Though a broader rollout could have appeared more ambitious, narrowing the scope ensured meaningful impact—enabling partners and sales teams to respond to RFX faster and with higher quality, thereby accelerating revenue.
Jessica defines this as purposeful innovation impact over optics. Guided by Design Thinking and robust Change Management, she ensures every solution is co-created, ethically governed, and centered on people. To her, technology should never replace humanity—it should amplify it.
Empowered Leadership
When reflecting on how she empowers individuals to unlock their full potential, Jessica explains that true empowerment is not abstract; it is a structured, measurable system rooted in clarity, trust, and accountability. She believes that people perform at their best when they take ownership of their success, and it is a leader’s responsibility to create the conditions for that ownership to thrive.
Jessica’s leadership approach builds freedom within a framework. She defines clear outcomes, equips teams with the autonomy and tools to decide how to achieve them, and reinforces this through transparent metrics, shared dashboards, and consistent alignment on both performance and behaviors.
For her, empowerment becomes tangible when accountability and growth are connected. At the individual level, success is reflected in delivery and cultural contribution. At the team level, it appears through business outcomes and engagement health. And at the leadership level, it is evident in promotion velocity, retention, and internal succession.
During her tenure as Director of Operations, this philosophy yielded measurable results: 36% of her team promoted within 12 months, zero voluntary attrition across multiple transformation cycles, and a 100% Manager Effectiveness score over consecutive years.
She believes that when people feel trusted, informed, and equipped to make decisions, they don’t just achieve goals, they redefine what’s possible. To her, empowerment is the architecture that makes transformation sustainable.
Operational Transformation
When asked how her work in Alliances and Channels Operations (A&C Ops) contributesd to driving operational transformation at a global scale, Jessica explains that A&C Ops serves as the engine that operationalizes Salesforce’s culture of innovation and customer success. Its mission is to transform partner collaboration into capacity, innovation, and sustainable growth.
At its foundation, A&C Ops translates vision into execution through three key levers of operational excellence.
First, it focuses on incentivizing strategic capacity by designing global programs that align partner incentives with certification and specialization milestones. This approach channels investment toward high-growth innovation areas, turning Salesforce’s partner ecosystem into an agile innovation multiplier. Many of these initiatives have achieved remarkable results, delivering up to a 300% year-over-year increase in partner-sourced revenue within just a few quarters.
Second, A&C Ops drives standardization and digitalization for scale by simplifying complex partner interactions through automation within the Partner Relationship Management (PRM) system, covering onboarding, deal registration, benefits, and support, to create unified and transparent global operations.
Third, Jessica has championed the embedding of AI into the partner experience. With the launch of Agentforce (Agentic AI capabilities), A&C Ops redefined partner engagement by introducing intelligent, 24/7 automated support that enhances satisfaction, efficiency, and scalability.
These initiatives have positioned A&C Ops as a critical catalyst in scaling Salesforce’s AI and data innovation, earning multiple industry awards in 2025 for excellence in global operational transformation.
Insightful Leadership
When asked about the distinction between data-informed and data-dependent leadership, Jessica explains that this difference defines how resilient organizations thrive in the digital era.
She notes that data-dependent leaders often treat data as a rulebook, reactive, backward-looking, and overly focused on dashboards and metrics rather than the underlying business problem or new opportunities that may not yet have measurable KPIs. In contrast, data-informed leaders use data as a compass, interpreting insights through the lens of business context, empathy, and intuition. While numbers describe reality, she emphasizes, they should never replace judgment.
Jessica outlines three key differentiators that separate the two leadership mindsets:
- Context over Correlation: Data shows what is happening, but experience, inquiry, and empathy reveal why. For instance, while reseller onboarding data once indicated inefficiency, deeper analysis uncovered that excessive customization, not the process itself, was the root cause. Addressing this behavioral issue shortened onboarding by nearly 12 days.
- Data Governance & Integrity: Reliable, standardized, and ethically sourced data forms the foundation of sound decision-making. Without it, even advanced AI models can amplify errors and accelerate poor outcomes.
- Human Discernment: As AI makes analytics more accessible, human interpretation becomes the real differentiator. Exceptional leaders question anomalies, connect analytics to customer truths, and preserve strategic creativity.
For Jessica, true leadership means treating data as dialogue, not just reading the numbers, but reading between them.
Responsible Automation
In her approach to implementing AI and robotic process automation (RPA) responsibly and sustainably, Jessica emphasizes that responsible automation begins with intention. Technology should enhance human potential rather than replace it. To her, automation is not merely an efficiency initiative but a people-driven transformation rooted in trust, ethics, and adaptability.
Her methodology is anchored in three guiding principles:
- Prioritize Human Impact
Jessica believes every automation initiative must start by understanding its effect on people. She focuses on assessing how roles and experiences will evolve, committing early to redeploy and reskill employees so they become process owners and advocates of transformation. - Build Compliance by Design
Ethical and regulatory governance, she notes, cannot be retrofitted. Preventative frameworks such as documenting rationale, integrating feedback loops, and monitoring bias create sustainable automation. For autonomous AI, transparency and traceability are essential for trust. - Design for Sustained Value
Long-term adaptability defines true sustainability. She ensures automation remains relevant by tracking both performance and process health through metrics like uptime, adoption, automation rate, and drift.
This philosophy has been externally recognized, with Salesforce earning honors for Revolutionizing Partner Support with AI at the Operational Excellence Awards (May 2025) and the Digital Transformation & AI Awards (June 2025). Jessica’s approach demonstrates that with strong governance, automation becomes a true catalyst for sustainable growth.
Sustainable Transformation
Across her journey from driving process optimization at Xerox to leading digital transformation at Google, and most recently spearheading strategic AI initiatives at Salesforce, Jessica identifies a single unifying principle: evolving systems and people together. For her, transformation is not an abstract ideal but a disciplined, structured practice grounded in operational integrity and scalability.
She believes standardization must precede automation, as technology amplifies whatever it touches, structure or chaos. By stabilizing processes first, organizations ensure that automation scales excellence rather than inefficiency. Every new initiative is assessed through the Design for Six Sigma framework to validate scalability, compliance, maintainability, and long-term stability before rollout.
Jessica also anchors transformation in integrity and governance, embedding Compliance by Design through transparent documentation, decision rationale, and proactive bias monitoring. During her leadership of Reseller Operations at Salesforce, these principles guided a tenfold ecosystem expansion (58% CAGR), establishing a robust data model that enabled automation, saving over 4,000 hours of sales capacity in the first year and exponentially more as the network scaled.
Her commitment to ethical innovation earned her an Ethics Trailblazer recognition from the Salesforce Office of Ethics & Integrity.
Ultimately, she believes sustainable transformation occurs when culture and capability evolve alongside technology.
She adds, “The real work of an operational excellence leader is to ensure humans remain accountable for outcomes, connecting creativity and structure, people and progress, innovation and integrity.”
Future Leadership
As AI continues to redefine the future of work, Jessica believes that the next generation of operations leaders must be visionary, capable of connecting technology, purpose, and people with equal fluency. She asserts that future-ready leaders will distinguish themselves not only by how they manage change but by how they interpret it, anticipate its direction, and translate it into meaningful progress.
Quoting Vince Lombardi, she often notes, “Visionary leaders create a compelling picture of the future and inspire others to make it real.”
According to Jessica, tomorrow’s operations leaders will be shaped by four essential competencies, each measurable, cultivable, and critical to sustained success:
- AI Literacy and Digital Fluency – Going beyond tool proficiency to understanding how AI strategically augments human capability and decision-making.
- Resilience and Comfort with Ambiguity – The ability to adapt and thrive amid constant reinvention and disruption while maintaining service excellence.
- Constructive Risk-Taking and Accountability – Innovating boldly yet responsibly, fostering a culture of ownership and psychological safety.
- Emotional Intelligence and Active Collaboration – Leading with empathy, self-awareness, and cross-functional cohesion within hybrid human–AI environments.
Jessica emphasizes that as AI reshapes the workplace, true leaders will be those who transform change into progress by uniting human insight with digital intelligence.
Ethical AI Leadership
Jessica defines Ethical AI Transformation as the deliberate alignment of AI systems with human values and organizational integrity far beyond a compliance checkbox. In her view, responsible AI is about harmonizing innovation with ethics, ensuring technology enhances rather than replaces the human experience.
As Director of Operational Excellence, she treats ethical AI not as an abstract principle but as a practical governance framework translating moral philosophy into measurable, repeatable business practice.
- Governance: The Ethical AI Operating Model
Ethical transformation begins with a robust governance structure:
- AI Ethics Council: A multidisciplinary body representing diverse stakeholders that defines ethical standards, reviews high-risk use cases, and enforces accountability.
- Algorithmic Transparency: Every model must document its intent, data sources, limitations, and bias testing results before deployment.
- Operationalized Fairness: Fairness metrics, such as the Disparate Impact Ratio (DIR), are embedded into development to ensure equity by design.
- Process: Augmentation Over Automation
Jessica emphasizes capability enhancement over workforce reduction.
- Job Redesign through Augmentation: Machines should manage the “four D’s” dull, dirty, difficult, and dangerous while humans focus on empathy, creativity, and complex problem-solving.
- Closed-Loop Human Oversight: Human feedback loops help correct and retrain models, keeping decision-making grounded in judgment.
- Culture: Data Literacy and Accountability
Ethical AI thrives only within an informed and accountable culture.
- AI Literacy for All: Organization-wide education reduces ethical blind spots and builds informed trust.
- Defined Accountability: Every AI-assisted outcome must have a responsible human owner; there is no such thing as an “AI decision.”
She believes the true measure of Ethical AI is not operational efficiency but its ability to amplify human potential. When guided by empathy, governance, and accountability, AI becomes a force for a more equitable and human-centered future.
Continuous Learning Culture
Jessica believes that continuous improvement begins with empathy when individuals see themselves evolving through change, progress becomes both personal and self-sustaining. For her, cultivating a culture of learning and growth within high-performing teams is about designing human excellence with intent.
Guided by Lean Six Sigma principles, she focuses on eliminating the “waste of unutilized talent”, ensuring that creativity and potential are fully engaged. By embedding structured learning into operational capability and prioritizing AI literacy and digital fluency, Jessica transforms apprehension about change into a source of energy and innovation.
She designs hybrid human-technology teams where AI amplifies human contribution, enabling people to reimagine their roles and reskill with confidence. Within this framework, learning is not incidental but systematic, built on clarity, trust, and psychological safety, where mistakes are viewed as data, not failure.
Through this disciplined approach, continuous improvement becomes a measurable and self-reinforcing outcome of an empowered learning culture.
Intelligent Empowerment
Jessica shares, “My vision for AI-driven operations transcends mere efficiency and cost reduction; it centres on enabling growth that amplifies human potential through operational intelligence, workforce transformation, and ecosystem collaboration.”
Operational Intelligence will advance from reactive to self-optimising systems through the integration of Digital Twins, virtual, real-time replicas of operations that continuously analyse internal data, partner inputs, and market dynamics. These models will predict risks, simulate outcomes, and autonomously fine-tune performance, creating adaptive, intelligent value chains. Jessica emphasises the importance of maintaining balance between automation and human oversight in managing such a transformation across global teams.
Workforce Transformation will see AI augmenting, not replacing, human capability. She highlights how AI Agents can expand roles by allowing professionals to act as trainers, validators, and ethical overseers, ensuring technology magnifies human judgment and creativity.
Finally, Ecosystem Collaboration will harness AI to connect federated systems across regions and partners. For Jessica, this vision underscores leadership’s role in establishing trust frameworks and robust data governance, ensuring that global operations not only scale intelligently but also empower people universally.
