Why Human-Centred Change is So Important in an AI Focused Landscape
In every strategy session and boardroom across the country, one topic is dominating the conversation: Artificial Intelligence. As leaders look to the future, the question is no longer if AI will be part of their strategy, but how.
The desire to play with this new technology is palpable. We’re hearing leaders asking the critical questions: What’s next for us? How can we use AI to enhance our strategy and become more effective or efficient?
When we break it down, these questions lead down two primary paths. The first is the most obvious: the back office. How do we use AI to streamline our internal operations and make the business more efficient?
The second, and far more strategic, path is about the customer. How can we use AI to genuinely help our customers? Is there a way for AI to enhance the outcomes they are trying to achieve and provide value?
AI Experimentation
Right now, most experimentation with AI is happening at the personal level. People are using tools like ChatGPT or Co-pilot to write emails faster, summarise reports, or brainstorm ideas. As one speaker at OPEX 2025 conference noted, while there is a possibility for AI to automate as much as 80% of project management work by 2030, many organisations aren't seeing a real ROI from their current trials. It's incredibly hard for an organisation to capture the value of one person saving ten minutes on an email. This is the productivity trap, we feel busier and more efficient, but the business itself isn't seeing a clear benefit. This camp of people use AI to short-circuit an outcome, to challenge a thought, to bounce an idea off, but it’s for their sole benefit. Although there is value in individual productivity, more staff becoming more efficient means they can focus on the tasks that require deep thinking. Still, this doesn’t touch the broader ailment here: What if the actual team processes were more effective? What if the customer-facing processes were more valuable, without humans having to tie their time to repeatable tasks?
This requires moving beyond individual productivity to enhance core business functions. This is where concepts like 'Agentic AI' which are bots that are able to manage multi-step processes come in. This approach moves AI from a personal assistant to a core component of your operational flow. However, without careful, human-centred design, it still runs the risk of becoming a purely impersonal and dehumanised component. This is why it is so important to understand where the human element must come into play, and where we can lean on AI to enhance our stakeholders’ experience.
AI for Efficiency vs. AI for Humans
This is where a human-centred lens becomes critical. The default approach is to look at our operational expenditure (OPEX) and ask, "How can we use AI to cut costs?" A human-centred approach asks a different question: "What is the ideal service we want to build for our customers?" and more importantly, “What are our customers asking for? What would be highly valuable to them?” It's about thinking how AI can be used to better serve your communities and what they truly need.
Once you’ve defined that ideal service, you can identify patterns. Are there parts of this service that AI can handle to free up your people to deliver more high-touch, empathetic work? The goal shouldn't be to simply replace the human element with a bot; it should be to embed a human-centred element into your AI strategy. The best use is to enable AI to handle the predictable, so your team can handle the personal, complex, and valuable.
The Human Must Stay in the Loop
As you build out your approach, you have a clear choice: a pure efficiency lens or a human-centred one. While technology can provide solutions, it cannot fully grasp the complexities of what is shifting, because the real challenge isn’t just about systems or speed; it’s about people.
This is because, as experts are quick to point out, AI is fundamentally a language-based model. Its outcome is based entirely on the strategic direction, human context, and data you provide. They are learning elements, and while they are learning incredibly fast, they are not making strategic decisions for you. And that deep thinking required to make AI valuable can only occur from people who understand their communities' issues.
AI, whilst a powerful tool, it cannot take the place of your team or leadership. It's not a strategist. It doesn't understand your mission. It is our responsibility as leaders to ensure there is always a "human in the loop," guiding the tool, questioning its outputs, and making the final call.
What Lasting Change Takes
AI can absolutely support this work. It can help us scale our impact and automate processes to free us up for the hard, human work. But it cannot lead it. It cannot replace the deep, human process of building trust, creating shared meaning, and understanding what a community truly needs.
We don’t show up with cookie-cutter solutions because, from our experience working with leaders driving change, we know they don’t work. That’s why we walk alongside teams to bring focus where things feel fragmented, build team alignment where it’s drifted, and reconnect strategy with how people work. This is how you create meaningful and lasting change.
If this resonates with you and you’re looking to move beyond using AI for simple productivity and start using it to drive real, human-centred value, please reach out when you're ready and book a call with us. Otherwise, to find the gaps that are holding you back right now, use our Impact Navigator to get started.