Three Steps to Manage GenAI Change in Your Business
While GenAI is new, the fundamentals of change management remain vital - perhaps more than ever.
Step 1: Apply GenAI to Change Fundamentals
Embed GenAI into your change management toolkit. Use it to generate insights, summarise stakeholder feedback, and simulate change scenarios. For example, your project management software can include GenAI-generated prioritisation based on strategic OKRs, with cards weighted by predicted impact and urgency using AI models. The time your teams save on these basic tasks is easily reinvested into more strategic, value-added activities.
Step 2: Understand the GenAI Lifecycle
In financial services, GenAI tools are being deployed rapidly, from client onboarding bots to risk modeling assistants. Change leaders must understand the GenAI lifecycle: from model training and deployment to ethical oversight and human-in-the-loop governance. When you understand the sum of its parts, identifying use cases or resolving issues around GenAI becomes much more targeted, instead of treating the technology as a single entity. When it comes to change management, your role is to assess whether the business area is ready - culturally, technically, and operationally - to adopt GenAI with a responsible and scalable outlook.
Step 3: Accelerate Change with GenAI Support
You can’t deliver change at GenAI speed without digital maturity. GenAI can accelerate stakeholder engagement, simulate adoption risks, and personalise training content. But the human enablement is vastly more important in all of these situations. GenAI should assist, but not replace, the empathy and trust needed for real transformation.
Strategic Assets for AI-Driven Change
The most important lesson: Build strategic assets that enable GenAI adoption:
- AI Literacy Labs: Spaces where employees can explore GenAI tools hands-on - from summarising documents to generating client insights.
- Simulated Environments: Mock platforms where staff can test GenAI features in a safe, experimental way - giving them confidence and understanding of how it will be used internally.
- Ethical Playbooks: Clear guidelines on responsible GenAI use, embedded into workflows and performance expectations.
For example, for client-facing teams, you could create a “GenAI Room” - a mock environment where the team could interact with AI tools, simulate client queries, and learn by doing. Sure enough, you'll see faster onboarding, better service, and more autonomous employees.
Conclusion: Treat GenAI Is a Co-Pilot, Not a Replacement
In the end, GenAI isn’t just new tooling for your organisation. It's an invitation to rethink how you lead change at scale, and to review process fundamentals across your business. Success lies in blending its speed and intelligence with human judgment, adaptability, and clear methodology. Most importantly, it will only deliver the desired competitive advantages - from productivity gains to faster informational access - if tied to a clear and interconnected change strategy. The businesses that pursue this approach will unlock transformation that is not only faster but fundamentally more human and more effective.
