Designing for Change in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
How do you unlock value from new technologies within an organization?
A few years ago, I was working with a call center that was about to be tested in every direction at once.
The company was going all in on a new generation of products, services, and support tools, including a mobile app, and the call center had to brace for a rapid rise in caseload. New volume. New technical knowledge. New diagnostic systems. New channels for support. The leadership team, who had spent years building a close-knit, high-retention culture, were suddenly expected to deliver leaner, smarter, and more integrated customer service.
The instinct was to address increased caseload volume and complexity as a tooling and training problem. Get the systems in, get the people trained, move on.
It was not a tooling problem. It was an organizational design problem.
"My role was to help leadership get clear on two things: how we actually do things here today, and what the future state needed to look like to serve the business and the customer."
The shift came when we recognized the organization's core capabilities were being rewritten. Call center agents were no longer going to be ticket closers. They needed to become the front-line eyes and ears of the engineering organization, relationship builders for a premium brand who could meet customers where they were, and advocates for continuous improvement.
This reframe in the capabilities expected of employees was fundamental to setting a strong foundation for new systems. Before building training plans, we needed a function-level strategy, refreshed processes, recalibrated incentives, and a deliberate decision about which people on today's team had a path into the future state, and where the gaps would be filled by new hires with different skills and mindsets.
When a redesign around capabilities is done deliberately, the people who built the business get a clear runway into the next chapter. When left up to chance, morale collapses, turnover rises, and leaders deplete themselves trying to hold strategy and operations in their heads at the same time.
Every organization I have talked to in 2026 is facing a version of this. The variables driving that shift are not only a new product line, a regulatory change, or a competitor's move, but also artificial intelligence.
Why Is AI an Organizational Design Problem?
The conversation around AI has moved from "which models" to "what does this mean for how we operate." Organizations are exploring workforce consolidation. Boards are asking about EBITDA upside. Private equity firms are pressure-testing portfolio companies on their AI plans. Family business owners are asking whether the people who built the company can carry it into the next decade.
AI fails when companies treat it as a technology rollout instead of a redesign of organizational capabilities.
The technology is the more straightforward part. The harder part is what introducing AI does to the organization underneath it. Introducing AI is similar to onboarding an army of skilled generalists whose speed and breadth is unmatched. Bring that army into a company without a plan, and it competes with, rather than complements, the existing structure, processes, incentives, and people. The result is wasted capital, frustrated leaders, demoralized teams, and ROI that never materializes.
A Framework That Works
Jay Galbraith's Five STAR Model is the most useful framework I have found for visualizing how organizations actually work: the interplay of strategy, structure, processes, rewards, and people. My modification is to put capabilities at the center. Capabilities are the accumulated knowledge, skills, and competencies an organization deploys against its strategy, and they are the layer most directly affected by AI.
The Modified Five Star Model by Jay Galbraith, adapted by Sentio Consulting.
When you introduce AI, you are not just adding a tool. You are changing what your people are required to do, what your processes need to produce, and what your structures need to enable. As computer-led tasks become more easily automated, the question every leader should ask first is this: what do you require of your people now?
At the call center, the answer was that agents needed to become stewards of front-line insight, channeling customer expertise back into the engineering organization. That is a different job. It requires a different design.
If you do not redesign around the capabilities the business now needs, the technology spend does not translate into enterprise value.
Value Creation at Exit
For a private equity-backed business preparing for sale, this is the difference between an AI initiative that lives on the value creation plan, and one that shows up at exit as a missed opportunity.
Generational Transition
For a family business in the middle of a generational handover, it is the difference between AI accelerating the transition, and AI fracturing the culture the founder spent decades building.
Takeaways
Change is hard. It is harder when leaders are asked to do strategic redesign on top of running the business. At high-performing organizations, change is treated as an opportunity to build better for the future, and the patterns established in the first transformation become the muscle memory for the iterative changes that follow.
The question is not which AI tools to adopt. The question is what your organization needs to be capable of, and whether your current design can get you there.
The Conversation We Are Built For
If you are an executive looking to increase the value of your organization, a private equity firm evaluating an acquisition, or a business owner thinking about the next chapter, and you want a clear-eyed read on where AI fits in the value story, that is the conversation we are built for.