Reconfiguring work: Change management in the age of gen AI

Gen AI has the potential to completely change how employees work. Its natural language interface makes it easy to use, while its burgeoning reasoning and agentic capabilities allow it to perform increasingly complex tasks such as interpreting large volumes of information, coding, and answering queries. The most advanced agents are even starting to perform tasks such as creating spreadsheets and navigating web pages. And employees are clearly eager to use it; they are already doing so three times more than their leaders realize.

But simply putting new technology into people’s hands does not ensure they will use it effectively, nor does it profoundly change the way a company works. Instead, CEOs need to deploy a novel change management approach that mobilizes their people, turning them from gen AI experimenters into gen AI accelerators. This is not a linear process. Change management in the gen AI age asks employees to become active participants rather than just users. It asks employees to experiment, cocreate products, and commit to continual skill development. It also recognizes that not everyone will make the transition smoothly, and that some employees will need additional support. 

Five steps that CEOs can use to lead their companies through these uncharted waters.

Step 1: Craft a North Star based on outcomes, not tools.  It’s tempting to view gen AI as just another tool that employees will be required to use. But CEOs are learning that this view is incomplete—and that employees see AI as more of a capability than a tool. An organization reconfigured around AI will have humans and gen AI agents working together seamlessly. While that future has not yet arrived, forward-thinking CEOs are creating North Star plans today to succeed in this new world tomorrow.  The North Star should be simple enough to be universally understood but bold enough to inspire teams. It should accommodate the evolution of technology and be able to absorb and activate frontier AI models and their new capabilities within a reasonable time frame.  Managing the magnitude of change that such a North Star represents will require two critical components: a well-resourced change management plan and a full reimagining of end-to-end workflows.

Step 2: Build trust with accessible data, governance, and enterprise wisdom.  Creating foundational trust in gen AI use throughout the organization is essential. After all, if employees don’t trust gen AI output, they won’t trust the decisions it makes. And, thus, the technology will have little chance of attaining scale.  The most trusted gen AI platforms are those grounded in an organization’s own context, revealing how answers are derived and the sources used. When deploying any gen AI model, a company should augment it with institutional knowledge such as proprietary research, customer interaction logs, or decades of engineering know-how. Companies can also consider boosting this internal knowledge base with dynamic external information. When gen AI delivers knowledgeable answers that users can trust, they will be far more apt to incorporate it into their daily workflows.

Step 3: Reimagine workflows to evolve toward AI teams.  Leaders can put gen AI at the center of workflows, entirely reconfiguring how work takes place in their organizations. To do this, it’s critical to use a two-in-the-box approach to change, where business and technology teams work together to define the new way of working. Business teams ensure the new working mode delivers the expected business results, while the technology team ensures the feasibility of architecting the technical change.  Such a reimagining can evolve over three phases to allow people to adapt to new ways of working. This evolution can progress from stand-alone AI agents that humans use to complete very discrete tasks, to groups of AI agents that complete full end-to-end processes overseen by humans, to fully automated agentic swarms that act independently as MVOs to deliver full business outcomes.

Step 4: Rethink organizational structures with a mix of MVOs and augmented teams.  As gen AI becomes embedded into workflows, CEOs will need to decide how different parts of the enterprise are structured. Only some business units may evolve into MVOs, which are extremely lean and highly automated workflows. Other parts of the company, meanwhile, will remain in step two of the AI evolution, giving human teams digital superpowers so they can accomplish more than ever. Both trajectories will require CEOs to modify organizational structures, communicating clearly with employees about how the changes will impact them.

Step 5: Empower employees to learn and become change agents.  Everyone at every level of an organization can learn together. However, some “superusers” can become powerful change agents who boost overall uptake. In any organization, these employees should be identified and supported to drive cultural change.

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