The Human Side of AI: Change Management, Passionistas, and the Race to Learn - Alison McCauley

Hosted by Alex Birke (https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexbirke/)), live from the SAFe & AI Summit 2026 in Amsterdam, this episode of Agile Amped features Alison McCauley, author, speaker, and change management strategist who has been working in AI since 2010.

Organizations are spending 93% of their AI investment on technology and only 7% on helping people actually use it, the same mistake made in every prior tech wave, from CRM to cloud. Allison draws on her early career pioneering one of the first enterprise CRM rollouts to show that the lesson has never changed: meet people where they are and show them value that matters to their lives.

The antidote is identifying and nurturing internal passionistas, people already experimenting with AI on their own, and turning them into circles of influence and change agents. Pair that with storytelling (not just successes, but the messy route to get there) and genuine two-way feedback channels, and organizations can close the gap between what AI can do and what their people are doing with it.

Allison also challenges practitioners to get their hands dirty first. If AI isn't blowing your mind on a weekly basis, you aren't pushing hard enough. The field is moving too fast for anyone to hold all the knowledge, the competitive advantage now belongs to those who can guide others through ambiguity using proven frameworks, not those who pretend to have all the answers.

Her closing reframe: don't stop at efficiency. The organizations that win the AI era won't just automate fastest, they'll be the ones that reallocate freed human capacity to create new markets, serve new customers, and build things that have genuine new economic value. Speed to learn, not speed to launch, is the new competitive edge.

Connect with Alison McCauley: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/unblocked/Allison • Website: https://www.alisonmccauley.io