Why AI Transformation Fails Without Change Management with Melissa Reeve

Melissa Reeves: Listening to the Change Management Review podcast

Teresa Moulton: where we bring you best tactics, strategies and actionable insights for organization talk with impactful organizational practitioners leaders. Now your host, Teresa Moulton. Welcome. My name is. I'm editor in Chief.

Melissa Reeves: You're.

Teresa Moulton: Of the Change Management Review. I am very lucky today to have our guest Melissa Reeves join us and she has a new book coming out called Hyper Adaptive in May of 2026 and we get the insider scoop on what that book is about and how it is going to be impactful for change management professionals and other business professionals involved in organizational transformation. Let me share a little bit about Melissa you before we dive into the content. Melissa Reeve is the founder of Hyper Adaptive Solutions and a veteran of organizational transformation. As a pioneer in agile marketing and former VP of marketing at Scaled Agile, she has spent over 25 years helping enterprises navigate the intersection of rapid technology shifts in human behavior. Now an author and speaker speaker, Melissa translates the complex world of AI into actionable organizational design strategies. Her upcoming book Hyper Adaptive provides a research backed blueprint for leaders to rewire their enterprises to become truly AI native. So without further ado, I'd like to welcome Melissa to the podcast.

Melissa Reeves: Thanks so much for having me. Teresa.

Teresa Moulton: Yes, it's wonderful to have you here and um, looking forward to diving right in. Um, after reviewing your book, uh, one of the points that you make is about the missing link in AI transformation and basically why 80% of AI initiatives fail. And I'm wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that.

Melissa Reeves: Sure. Well, there's a lot of reasons why they're failing. Sometimes it's as simple as the disconnect between business and it. Right? It develops a solution that the business isn't ready to use or doesn't quite meet the needs of the business. But I think beyond that, it's the spinning up of what I call support structures. And uh, these support structures are essentially the change management function that needs to move organizations from what I call being linear. So you think about strategy to execution, you think about concept to delivery, all the handoffs and delays that happen there. And AI compresses both of those dimensions. The question for enterprises and larger organizations becomes how do you get from here this linear organization to an AI native or hyper adaptive organization? The answer is iteratively and incrementally. This doesn't happen overnight. And so we start to spin up these support structures to support the organization in this shift. And my guess is your change management professionals will recognize the patterns that I describe in the book. But it's really that's that's the missing piece. And I like to, um, I like to give the analogy of the PC. When the PC rolled out in the 1990s, we didn't just put a, uh, PC on the desk of everybody and say, good luck. We spun up IT help desks, we spun up entire IT departments. And so it's that kind of support that's missing and causing those 80% of failures that we're seeing in the world today.

Teresa Moulton: Yeah, you know, that's interesting. And I think for some of the change management professionals that are practicing out there, AI is still in the generative AI mode and just now starting to be integrated into workflows. And so understanding what some of those structures might look like may not have completely, uh, clicked yet. So could you give some specific examples of what some of those structures look like?

Melissa Reeves: Sure. Happy to. So in the foundation stage, the hyper adaptive model goes through five different stages. Everything from laying the foundation to integrating AI into your workflows, just like you said, to agentic AI, to scaling those agentic workflows, to orchestrated value streams. And so at the very foundational level, we have, uh, your AI councils and your AI leads. And I know that a lot of organizations have honed in on that and said, oh, well, we have an AI council or yeah, we have some AI leads. And for those individuals, I'd ask them, yes. And is, are your AI councils dynamic? Do you have dynamic governance in place to keep up with AI as it evolves? And for the AI leads, have you simply appointed these leads or have you truly empowered them to become change agents within the organization? Have you taken a programmatic look at that to say, how do we take the knowledge in the top 10% and unlock that and spread that through the organization? And then we fire up something I call the AI activation hubs. And this is a network of hubs. Think of them as your network of centers of excellence. And I know that that's a term a lot of people resonate with and their role is to really keep tabs on what's going on with AI. So recently Anthropic released Anthropic, uh, Claude 4.6. And so this network of activation hubs would take a look at that, take a look at the additional AI capabilities. And they would atomize the learning and send this instruction over to legal, this instruction over to finance, this piece, over to, to marketing. And they're really responsible for organizing the training, the measurement, uh, consolidating success patterns. You know, the things a normal center of excellence would, would generally keep tabs of. But those are the types of support structures I'm, I'm suggesting are needed in order to start really moving the organization and capitalizing on their AI investment.

Teresa Moulton: So what's interesting about that to me Melissa, is that it sounds like these councils are centers of. Sorry, these centers of excellence are not just uh, made up of change management professionals. They're actually more, uh, broadly populated with people in the business if they're all going to be change agents. So, so how would that work?

Melissa Reeves: Yeah, so um, it's a great question and I talk a fair amount also with individuals who are in charge of running the people side of the organization. So hr, learning and development, things like that. And I could see these AI activation hubs, uh, housing people who are from learning and development. Like maybe there's still learning and development that happens at a broad scale. But what if you had your change management professionals paired with L and D experts, uh, and able to atomize this learning and you pair them with other people who are experts at collecting best practices. And the activation hub also houses people who are AI experts and who can pair with different parts of the organization. So you're correct in that this center of excellence goes way beyond what we normally think of to really serve as an enablement function for AI throughout the organization.

Teresa Moulton: That's really neat. And uh, it brings me to think about, um, as AI becomes more agentic and now we have a broader set of knowledge and skills humanly together, um, in these activation hubs as they start to integrate with the workflows of the AI. Now we've got a broader set of knowledge that can set guardrails, um, and some of those ethical boundaries for the machine itself. How do you find that working out?

Melissa Reeves: Yeah, so I think that that points to dynamic governance. And the way I think about governance today is it's decided by committee. Generally it's uh, uh, document is created, that document sits out on the Internet and nobody can find it.

Teresa Moulton: Exactly.

Melissa Reeves: And maybe, maybe we deploy some, some learning that people are listening to at triple speed and clicking through to check the box that they, they have indeed, uh, learned the guardrails. I think in this world of AI, we need to shift that and one, create layers of governance. So, so you might have a cross functional group of people who are meeting on a much more frequent cadence to decide the general guardrails around AI. And then you probably need groups of people at the functional level who are taking those guardrails and saying this is what it means for our area of the business. And Then I call your AI leads, the frontline guardians. They are very, yeah, they're very familiar with this governance and, and they're the go to people that any practitioner can ask, hey, what are the guardrails around this? And then there's actually a fourth layer which think of a custom GPT that you can query. And maybe you're sitting in finance and you have a question around customer data that you want to use to interact with AI, but you're not quite sure what the boundaries are and you um, you don't want to be wrong because your job might be at stake.

Teresa Moulton: Right.

Melissa Reeves: If you queried this governance GPT and it could give you maybe, maybe a traffic signal response like red, absolutely, don't do it, yellow, you can do it, but with these caveats, or green, you're pretty much in the clear. That's what I'm talking about when I mean dynamic governance. And all those layers I talked about can contribute to, to that dynamic, uh, knowledge base so that it's always up to date and people are always getting the most current information.

Teresa Moulton: It's so interesting because in this conversation with you, I'm really starting to feel the AI workplace come alive in a way that I can understand it, um, and really envision how change management professionals could interact with the organizational structure with, with putting up these microstructures you're talking about and then the systems, um, it's fascinating. And so one of the topics that comes up is psychological safety. And what are your views on how that impacts this?

Melissa Reeves: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And psych. Psychological safety is, is becoming such a buzzword. It's so important and yet it's becoming such a buzzword. Uh, it almost feels meaningless. Like people, you know, they, they whitewash it and they, you know, they say, oh well, we've got it without necessarily practicing it. So. Right, 100% you need it. And the question becomes, how do you get it? One of the ways I, I believe organizations are falling down is, is because they don't have what I call the AI North Star. And yeah, the AI North Star is the compelling reason why you're using AI. And I love to cite Moderna as an exemplar of somebody who has a wonderful AI North Star. And they say that they're going to bring 15 new drugs to the market in 5 years with the help of AI. Normally it takes 10 years to bring one drug to market if you're a big pharmaceutical company. And so all of a sudden it gives everybody, an organization, the chance to align, uh, around a Common mission. It shifts the narrative from jobs are going away to here's the big hairy, audacious goal we're going to accomplish with AI because the reality is in any organization there's more to be done than can ever be done. And we're always making trade off decisions. And so let's align around a mission in order to bring the temperature down and create some of that psychological safety that's so imperative to AI success.

Teresa Moulton: Yeah. And so the psychological safety, um, hits me as external and internal to organizations. Right. So we have these um, forces outside the organizations for people who are in the current job market and all the hype around there aren't any jobs available and people are getting laid off. Instead of, uh, adapting an AI first mindset and upskilling, they're just, you know, shifting people out. And then there's the psychological safety that you're talking about within the organization. And so help me debunk some of that in terms of what's really going on, um, for folks who are, you know, change management professionals looking to grow their careers at this point in time.

Melissa Reeves: Yeah, I think so. I think part of what's going on is, is the parasympathetic nervous system where you have fight, uh, or freeze.

Teresa Moulton: Right.

Melissa Reeves: I sense that many organizations are in the frozen state because AI is so big and it's so amorphous. It requires a level of sense making. You've got to make sense of it, you've got to contextualize it and contain it before you can move forward with it. So what's actually happening with all these layoffs and these headlines? One is it makes a good headline, right. To say like we're gonna, all the jobs are going away and we're gonna cut all these jobs. I like to say it lacks imagination. Uh, and there's, there's something called AI washing, which is we're doing all of these layoffs because we're trying to make our bottom line look good. And the research shows only 4% of the layoffs that are attributed to AI in the headlines are, are actually because of AI.

Teresa Moulton: Interesting.

Melissa Reeves: Yeah, there's this great gap between myth and reality and then as far as things like entry level jobs. So I just wrote a big article about this which is it's very short sighted to either lay off your entry level people or stop hiring them. Because what we see is that jobs are shifting from doing the task, executing the task, to evaluating the output of AI.

Teresa Moulton: Right.

Melissa Reeves: If we don't start pairing our entry level people with the more senior level People who are equipped to evaluate the output of AI. We're going to cut off our hiring pipelines. We're not going to have somebody available to move into those senior level positions. So I'm getting a little ranty pants here. Uh, but for the change management professionals in the room, I would say the best thing you can do, do for yourself is to truly lean into AI. Understand that 70% of success is, is the rewiring of people and processes and roles. And understand that you not only have a role to play, you have a very important role to play, especially over the next three to X years as enterprises are making this transition.

Teresa Moulton: Right. So what are the most important things for me as a change professional today, uh, who might just have started dabbling in generative AI and maybe now Copilot has hit my Microsoft Teams world. Maybe one function in my company has actually started using, uh, AI. You know, what do I need to do to improve my career, um, achievements or goals, or add the most value to my organization?

Melissa Reeves: Sure, there's, there's so many different answers that are coming to mind, but I'll, I'll pick one which is think of something that you don't like to do. Uh, so I will give the example of Vizient and Vizient Healthcare wanted their coders, their development people to start using AI. And the coders were naturally resistant because they wanted to, um, they thought AI was going to take their jobs and they're like, no way we're going to lean into this. So they actually brought in some, some change management professionals to run empathy sessions with individuals and they went through the empathy mapping exercises and, and what they helped these developers to see is that there were actually many parts of their jobs that they didn't really love. They didn't love the bug tracking, they didn't love the testing. And by helping them see, a there were parts of their jobs that they actually would love AI to handle and B, helping them see how AI could help them expand the parts of their jobs that they really loved. They were able to open hearts and minds to this thing called AI.

Teresa Moulton: Interesting.

Melissa Reeves: I just invite the change management, uh, professionals listening to this podcast to really do the same exercise with themselves. Think about the parts of your role that you maybe don't care for. Think of the parts of your role that you really love and you want to lean into and then challenge yourself to learn AI, to offload the parts you don't love and amplify the parts that you do love. And if you're brand new to AI, just ask AI hey, here's what I'm trying to do. How do I do this step by step and allow AI to guide you through the learning journey?

Teresa Moulton: Yeah, that's, that's brilliant. That's well said. It's a little shocking sometimes right, to be able to ask this interface. Okay, so what do I do now? You know, and have it actually respond?

Melissa Reeves: I know, uh, it's like magic, it's the magic genie.

Teresa Moulton: But coming back to um, the role of the change practitioner or change professional over the next say 18 months, three years, how do you see that evolving?

Melissa Reeves: So over the next period of time, I think that the change professional will evolve exactly like we were talking about. I don't know a single organization who is able to invest in change management to the level that it truly deserves. And there probably aren't enough change management professionals who could staff those positions. Coaching comes to mind that one on uh, one coaching. So when you think about the rewiring of roles, and I like to say that roles will move from doing the task to building, monitoring and maintaining the automations that do the task. This is a real identity crisis and we need to help each other through this identity crisis. Now if there were a bajillion change management people, we could just deploy them all and have one on one coaching sessions with everybody. But in lieu of that then we've got to use our coaching resources very judiciously. What AI will allow that professional to do is maybe uh, create more coaching materials for middle level managers who are having those one on one conversations with the people on their teams. Maybe it's something like we create a coaching GPT that continually updates itself and we're now the guardians of this, this GPT. And because we've got more uh, two way communication, meaning we can see what people are putting into the GPT. Anonymized of course. We really truly understand the pain points and we get visibility into what's really happening in the organization.

Teresa Moulton: Mhm.

Melissa Reeves: So I want to take a pause there and just hone in on one little aspect which is surveying people

Teresa Moulton: in

Melissa Reeves: your experience, does this happen?

Teresa Moulton: Uh, does what happened just like serving

Melissa Reeves: people to get sentiment analysis and.

Teresa Moulton: Oh yes, uh, and it then it becomes obsolete.

Melissa Reeves: It becomes obsolete and it's not very nuanced. And I had this aha moment the other week that said, because I was working with a PhD in psychology and she was talking about this survey she was going to deploy.

Teresa Moulton: Right.

Melissa Reeves: And I said well what if now with vibe coding, now with the capabilities, we could have more of an interactive Session where people are just AI is asking the question, but then they through voice can give us the true answer. Then we can analyze all of these full complete answers rather than trying to boil people's opinions down to a Likert scale. And a few comments at the end. I feel like in terms of a change management professional, that really unlocks your ability to manage what's really going on instead of groping around in the dark.

Teresa Moulton: You know, it's very interesting that you bring this up because one of Change Management Review's partners is Pandatron AI and they have the AI coaching and so they are able to do exactly what you said. Um, and to me it's one of the first times the change management profession has had an actual tool that can come in and do real time sentiment analysis. Provide executives with the uh, here's what's really going on in the XYZ function, here's the real time strategies that we need to deploy. And oh, by the way, that general communication, uh, message that everyone's been deploying, it's not working.

Melissa Reeves: It's not working. Mhm.

Teresa Moulton: Right.

Melissa Reeves: How powerful. It makes me realize how much we've shortchanged the process. All these years we were doing the best we can and now we've just double jumped.

Teresa Moulton: Exactly. And so, um, you know, some of our uh, colleagues are, you know, still focused on the technical aspects of the change management toolkits. And that's good because you need to know those. But in my opinion, some of those are going to get absorbed into the system. So what we really need to do is what you were saying before is get comfortable with the evaluation and the judgment and the white space and the sense making of what comes out of say a sentiment analysis, what comes out of an impact assessment so that we can actually take that information and be more consultative as a professional.

Melissa Reeves: Yeah. And the other area where we cha. We shortchange ourselves as humans, as organizations, as change professionals is integrated learning loops. So now that you have this, say more about that. Yeah, now that you have this powerful sentiment analysis, I don't know about you, but so many times we get the output of something like that. Here's the sentiment, here's what's going on, but we don't know how to action it. And even if, uh, action it and say, hey, you know, it seems like finance is really in trouble and you know, here's your mitigation plan, we don't close that loop, so we don't put the plan in place, then measure the impact of that, see what we can Improve and create these integrated learning loops and continuous improvement cycles to, to demonstrate our value. Because I feel like that's, that's a hard part of change management.

Teresa Moulton: Yes.

Melissa Reeves: Demonstrating the value.

Teresa Moulton: Absolutely.

Melissa Reeves: What if we can accelerate that as well?

Teresa Moulton: Right. Yeah, that would be very, that would be very powerful. And so as you put your book together around the hyper adaptive organization and the model and all of the excellent research, what is the, what is the one or two, what are the one or two key points that you think will be the most important for change management professionals to take take with them about this topic?

Melissa Reeves: So I like to say uh, that 20, you, you can't expect 21st century results with a 20th century operating model. So the operating models of current organizations are still have their roots in Taylorism and the, you know, that's the assembly line. They still have their roots in the functional silos of the 1950s and 60s. We've known that this structure has been broken for a long time and yet there hasn't been a forcing function to change it. I believe AI is going to be that forcing function and this is the part that most organizations are missing. It's not going to happen on its own. You need to install these support structures, really invest in the change management to rewire the organization while it's in flight. And uh, just like we invested in the help desks of the 90s and the IT departments, we really need to invest in the change management, in the rewiring of the people, the organizational structure, the roles, the workflows in order to make this transition.

Teresa Moulton: Yeah, really well said. Um, I must, I must say, uh, that you are um, one of, I think you're a unicorn in terms of the, you know, one of the first people that I've met who really has embodied the future of work with AI and applied what the change management world is actually going to do in terms of impacting the future of work, um, and how people need to evolve and support that work. Um, so I'm so happy to have you here.

Melissa Reeves: It's such a pleasure to be here. And when I think about the research that I did for the book, I think it's research that your audience will be familiar with. It's Peter Senge and learning organizations, it's John Cotter and uh, change, it's Clayton Christensen. It's really just the extension of this for the age of AI in the understanding of where we're coming from and where we need to go.

Teresa Moulton: Yes. And I think one of the points that you made that's really sticking for Me out of this interview is this concept of the identity shift that everybody's gonna go through. And that's fundamental because I think we've experienced it on little eye around roles like in re engineering and just business process change. But this is a fundamental big I identity shift that everybody's gonna go through as a business professional. And that's the core of what we as, uh, change professionals really need to get comfortable about for ourselves is which I think you brought up in order to be able to help others with that.

Melissa Reeves: And yet, ideally, the change management professionals out there are the ones with the growth mindset. They're the ones who can embrace the new way of working and the new identity and really serve as role models for other individuals and help them see. For some reason I've got this image of furniture making in my head, you know, because we're going from like being craftsmen of our, of our thing, whatever it is, change management, writing, engineering, you know, doing it by hand, just like you used to do furniture by hand. And now the spectrum is increasing. So my guess is we'll still have the artists and writers. You know, I wrote Annie Leibowitz is not, is not afraid of AI generated images. Uh, right. But we're also going to have Ikea, Right? We're going to have the cheaply generated stuff that's lower value, but that will also have an audience and it'll be a ride for sure. But I'm confident that the people in the world, and especially your listeners, will be able to navigate that change.

Teresa Moulton: That's wonderful. That's wonderful news. So, um, we're about out of time, uh, Melissa, so how do we find your book and how do we stay in touch with you, uh, and ask you questions and interact with you?

Melissa Reeves: Yeah. Thanks so much, Teresa. This one's so fast. There's so much goodness and richness. So I can, uh, be found on LinkedIn on Melissa M. Reeve. Uh, join me on my substack Intel Hyperadaptive Solutions and, uh, pre order the book. It's up on Amazon or, or if you hit my website, you'll see all the pre order bonuses. Because this is, this is so hot and it's so good, people are knocking down my door to get to it. And you'll get early access to some of the frameworks if you pre order it through my website.

Teresa Moulton: That's fantastic. Well, thank you again for being on the show and hopefully we can have you be involved in some other change management review events and, uh, activities as you continue to explore this part of the field.

Melissa Reeves: I'd love to. Thanks for having me on the show. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Change Management Review podcast. To get alerts for new episodes, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn, subscribe to our weekly newsletter, or subscribe to follow on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you find great podcasts.