SHELDON MONTEIRO
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
Navigating the human cost of change Leading digital transformation means guiding organisations through one of the most volatile shifts in history. For Sheldon, navigating structural change is deeply personal, rooted in an itinerant childhood that taught him to adapt early.
“ Change is always hard,” he acknowledges.“ When I grew up, we moved every two to three years so I learned how to handle change at a very young age, but that didn’ t make change any easier; it just made it more tolerable.”
That resilience shapes how Sheldon views the current AI revolution – not merely as a suite of new software, but as a fundamental rewrite of the human workplace.
“ I am a geek about work,” he continues.“ I don’ t just mean in doing my work but in how work itself works – that’ s one of my passion areas. As I look at the wave we are in right now with AI, it is phenomenal how much of a lift we have had not just as a company, or industry, but as a human species, in how we think about work.
“ You can look at that as a challenge or threat but I see it as change that has to be navigated. At times, it will feel brutally hard in terms of what it is doing to people’ s careers, for example, but it is exciting at the same time because we need to invent better futures.”
The RPA trap One of the biggest missteps C-suite leaders are making today is treating AI transformation like previous automation cycles – specifically, robotic process automation( RPA).
SHELDON MONTEIRO
TITLE: EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER
COMPANY: PUBLICIS SAPIENT
INDUSTRY: DIGITAL BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION
LOCATION: CHICAGO, US
Rising from software engineer to leading global technology strategy, Sheldon leverages decades of crossfunctional expertise to drive enterprise evolution and digital transformation.
HEADQUARTERS: BOSTON, US NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES: 20,000 + MARKET CAP: US $ 25BN NUMBER OF COUNTRIES: 26
Sheldon warns that applying legacy strategies to intelligent systems is a fatal flaw in leadership logic:“ Management consultancies and enterprises are falling into a trap: dusting off old RPA playbooks, slapping on new terminology and applying the same old recipe. But while RPA centres on the process, in AI transformation the existing process is actually the constraint.
120 September 2026