Kotter gave us eight steps for change. With AI, it’s only three.
Asking your team to work differently, even better, means asking them to relearn. And relearning is where most change efforts quietly stall.
At BGR, our sales team ran on a lot of manual processes. Every one of them was a habit someone built over years. Ask a rep to drop that habit for a better one and you’re not offering an improvement. You’re handing them homework.
So we stopped asking.
Kotter Built the Model. AI Changes the Terrain.
John Kotter’s eight-step model has always been my favorite. I spent years before BGR running change management for large organizations, and his steps held up every time:
Create urgency
Build a guiding coalition
Form a strategic vision
Communicate the vision
Remove obstacles
Generate short-term wins
Build on the change
Anchor it in the culture
Kotter’s eight steps, from Leading Change (1996).
But I’m starting to question how we apply it. We owe our employees a rethink, even if it means challenging one of my heroes.
The model assumes change is the hard road. So half the steps go to persuading people to walk it. We’ve treated “getting buy-in” as a sales job, and the people on the receiving end can feel it.
What if AI could make the new road easier than the old one? Then you don’t need to sell it. Here’s how eight steps become three.
1. Find Their Pain
Replaces steps 1–4
THEIR pain. Not just the problem you want solved.
Ask. Better yet, sit with your team and experience it yourself. Watch a rep build a quarterly review by hand. Watch someone recalculate pricing off a published index with a calculator and a spreadsheet. You’ll know within an hour where the drag is.
Once you find a pain the team already feels, Kotter’s first four steps take care of themselves:
Urgency: it already exists. You don’t have to manufacture it.
Coalition: the people feeling the pain are your coalition.
Vision: ending the pain is the vision.
Communicating: a working fix does the communicating. Nobody needs a memo.
2. Cut and Create
Replaces steps 5–6
Turn the painful task into an AI agent or a reusable skill inside the AI tools your team already uses. Claude, Copilot, ChatGPT: the platform matters less than where it lives. If it’s not embedded in the daily workflow, it won’t happen.
Cutting the manual work is how you remove obstacles. The first one-click result is your short-term win. At BGR that now includes building a quarterly review, building a sales deck, delivering index pricing, and analyzing a customer’s spend and trends. A year ago, asking reps to do any of that differently would have been too much.
But don’t stop at the cut.
I think that’s one reason so many AI initiatives fail to live up to the ROI hype. They count hours saved without asking what new value those hours could create. The bigger opportunity isn’t doing the same work 2–10% better. It’s doing something valuable you couldn’t do before.
Before: Index pricing was manual math off a published index: hard, error-prone, and a team effort.
Now: An AI skill does it in one click.
The cut.
Before: Pricing changes were reactive.
Now: We proactively review the index with customers, so they can see why their pricing moves up AND down.
The create.
Before: Customer reviews reported what a customer spent.
Now: They reveal where millions in savings are hiding.
The create.
Cutting time is table stakes. Creating value you couldn’t deliver before is the point.
3. Share the Win
Replaces steps 7–8
Don’t just share the success story. Share the skill or agent that made it possible.
Make it available across your department or organization, right inside the AI tools employees already use. Make the win easy to repeat, and employees will show each other.
That’s how you build on the wins and anchor them in the culture. No elaborate campaign required.
What It Looked Like at BGR
Over two years, the 15 reps who volunteered for the new way grew revenue 90%. The 15 who kept the old way fell 7.5%. The new way won because it was the easier road.
The better way becomes the easy way.
Progress Is the Point
Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer asked 238 employees across seven companies to keep daily work diaries, and collected more than 12,000 entries.¹ Their finding: of everything that can lift people’s emotions and motivation during a workday, the most important is making progress in meaningful work. 76% of people’s best days involved progress.
Yet when managers around the world ranked what motivates employees, only 5% put progress first. It came in dead last.
Progress isn’t just a top- or bottom-line number. It’s cultural. And it’s the one your people feel most.
Stop selling change. Remove the drag. Let people feel progress.
That’s the new standard for leaders.
Before your next rollout, sit with your team for an hour. Where does their day feel stuck, and what could they create if it didn’t?
This is the work Velocity does with leadership teams: find the pain, cut and create, then share the win so it sticks.
Start with a free Velocity Diagnostic →
See it at work: What we do and Results at BGR.
Sources: ¹ Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011); also cited in Dan Heath, Reset. John Kotter, Leading Change (Harvard Business School Press, 1996).
