Preparing for AI’s Next Wave: Agentic, Quantum, and Managing Change Throughout

How do we think about change management in the AI era?

I think change management is going to look really different. First, the technology is developing at such a clip that there's going to be continual waves of change required inside companies. So a traditional PMO-led approach, where there's a change that has a start and a stop, doesn't apply anymore. You have to embed change management capabilities inside a company. 

The other thing to layer on is the fact that in order to get value from this technology, you have to have business executives working alongside technology executives. We call them bilingual teams. I think that is a way you set up initiatives and attack problems that is different than the baton pass that happened in previous change management efforts. I think it's a very different way of driving change through an organization than in prior cycles. 

Where is the technology going from here? 

It's really hard to overstate the importance of agentic. Agents are a bit underestimated right now because I think the world is looking at them as sort of souped-up chatbots. And the reality is, these are individual software applications that are making decisions, that have memory—all with a human in the loop today, but with the possibility that they can take on entire parts of a workflow or even one day run entire organizations. 

So I think where we've gone through a cycle of traditional AI to generative AI, now generative to basic agentic, you're going to see complex agentic as the focus of companies for the next three to five years. 

Should I pay attention to quantum?  

I think quantum is a fun one. I think this is a case of let's not overreact and let's not underreact. The technology is certainly progressing, but it's progressing at a gradual pace. So I think it will be many years before we see practical applications of quantum. The space that clients need to pay attention to is cyber. It is very clear that quantum is going to crack the encryption techniques of cybersecurity today and that there are nefarious actors out there harvesting data and waiting to one day apply quantum to our current cryptography. If there's a place for clients in the world to dial up focus on quantum, it's going to be in the cyber space in 2026.

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