Your AI budget must fund a change in how people work
Technology is quick to acquire. Changing how people work takes sustained management effort. I learned that long before the current AI wave.
At Shell, I led a programme to change how technology developers and major-project professionals approached innovation: more commercial thinking, more systems thinking, greater use of external knowledge and more confidence in managing innovation risk. Later, at OMV Petrom, we built a Digital Academy alongside the technical transformation portfolio.
In those programmes, the technology was the easier part. Leadership had to make room for different habits, different questions and different ways of deciding.
Put adoption into the operating plan
An AI deployment changes expectations around skills, decision rights, processes and management behaviour. Budget for that work when you budget for the technology.
Name the tasks people will perform differently. Give them time to practise, access to specialist support and a manager who knows what good work should look like. Decide which existing activity will stop or shrink so that adoption has somewhere to fit.
In the Power BI citizen-development work at OMV Petrom, I partnered with IT, established a business council and supported developer communities with access to supplier expertise. Adopting new practices alongside existing day jobs was a central challenge. Access to the tools did not allocate time in anybody’s calendar.
Measure the changed work
Look at how the work is actually delivered. Is the new method part of the normal process? Can colleagues use and maintain what has been created? Does management act on the information it produces? Where is the old process still running alongside it?
Usage figures can start a conversation. The operating evidence should carry the investment decision.
The AI Strategy Deployment Diagnostic helps leadership investigate the gaps between its ambition and the conditions for delivery. Practical learning and management support then need owners, resources and a place in the plan.
If the transformation budget has a line for licences and no serious provision for changing work, the budget is unfinished.