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We have been working with this client since their AI journey began several years ago, when we took our first steps together to raise general awareness and understanding of AI basics. As AI has evolved, so has their need for interventions that move beyond awareness to business-as-usual adoption of AI tech and tools.
Global / International
Professional Services
400,000+
"We’ve developed a suite of innovative AI-based products for our teams to use. Adoption is proving to be trickier than we’d anticipated. We want to deploy Change Agents globally to drive adoption. Can you help optimise their impact?”
Due to the pace and pressure of AI evolution, no organisation can afford to remain focused only on awareness if they want to strategise, innovate and transform in a tech-driven world.
This call to action resonated loud and clear with our client, whose business is known for its expertise and its agility. However, in one business division, they had observed that regional partners and senior managers were struggling to recognise the urgency or full impact of AI on professional services. Tech support was in place, but this was not enough.
AI adoption isn’t just about making tools available. It’s about embedding AI into how people perceive and approach their work.
To remain competitive and deliver value for customers, they must nurture internal AI adopters and advocates, developing a group of influential AI change agents.
Despite the focus on technology, this AI project was about people. They needed a human-centered change, informed by behavioural science, to empower and educate those who will sustain AI adoption and reinforce it within their sphere of influence.
AI is different from any other technology we’re used to working with, so traditional L&D or change strategies struggle to help employees to get to grips with AI’s transformative brilliance, its unpredictability, and the tsunami of risk, opportunity and emotion this creates.
Many AI adoption strategies focus on building employee knowledge of how to use AI tools. However, sustainable AI adoption requires a broader appreciation of how AI is reshaping organisations and the nature of work itself. These changes bring wide-ranging implications for an individual’s sense of identity, ethical stance and motivation. Simply knowing how and when to use AI does nothing to address these deeper human concerns.
While our client had data on AI-tech usage and uptake, behavioural data was sparse, so through targeted surveys and focus groups, we sought the answers to these questions, asking in each case: “What is stopping this from happening today? What might enable this to happen in the future?”
• Why is talking about AI with clients a challenge?
• Why is using AI-tech in the daily flow-of-work a challenge?
• Why is sharing AI-tool value gains, failures and learnings internally a challenge?
During this discovery phase, we also explored what the most pressing barriers and enablers were for our change agents that we would need to address.
Capturing and analysing these insights enabled us to tailor an intervention built around the barriers and enablers to becoming an AI change agent.
A human-centered solution meant that people needed people. Our behavioural data highlighted their need to be in a physically and psychologically safe space, as part of a trusted cohort. Here, they could expose and explore their barriers to AI adoption, in an effort to overcome these and feel confident as an authentic change agent.
As a result, partners and senior managers were hand-picked to become change agents, based on their skill and will to influence others.
They received an invitation to attend a 2-day exclusive event (delivered across APAC, MENA, US and UKI), where they could openly and honestly discuss and raise questions about AI. The agenda included activities that encouraged healthy conflict and debate, to share and learn from others’ experiences, whether these were examples of best practice or innovation, or cautionary tales benefitting from hindsight. Time was also baked in for informal, networking peer to peer conversation.
Industry and internal experts joined as guest speakers to share insights and to answer the tough questions and help equip partners and senior managers with the tools and confidence to influence clients and peers, through better conversations around AI.
Evolved roles
The organisation has transitioned people from "accountants” to "technologists“, bringing in specialists and training them in practice areas. Consequently, employees are seeing that AI will not replace humans but will enhance and standardise ways of working.
A new humility is pervasive across the organisation where expertise is recognised as coming in many forms andfrom many perspectives. Change agents are deriving personal value from contributing to collective tools and knowledge and as a result enhancing their 'personal brand'.
Key wins:
• Regional partners and senior managers now scope, use and recommend AI tools in all client engagements.
• A group of authentic change agents who continue to experiment, challenge perceptions, raise awareness and encourage wider AI adoption.
• Improved client delivery, increased efficiency (better margins) and more competitive offerings.
• Organisational use of AI tools creating tailored, data-driven insights to drive customer, shareholder and employee value.
We'd love to explore the potential for behavioural science to inspire positive change within your organisation.
