Digitalisation, AI and organisational change
Transformative intelligence
The ERP went live months ago. Much of the work still runs on spreadsheets.
It happens often, and almost never for a technical reason.
What transformative intelligence is
Transformative intelligence is an organisation's capacity to evolve as a whole and in a coordinated way: its people and its structure, its processes and flows, its systems, its skills and its training.
It is not change handed down from the top. It is the genuine involvement of people at every level and their initiative: the ability to truly adapt and drive change, rather than simply accepting it or having it imposed on them.
Organisations change because everything around them changes: markets, the technologies that come within reach, the rules, the skills required. Choosing a system and installing it is the part you can plan and control. The way people work, by contrast, does not change because a project plan says so.
This is, in all likelihood, the organisational capability that leadership should invest in ahead of any other. And it is not confined to one sector: the pace of change is high in every market, whatever the business model.
What has to be able to change
Not one area at a time, but all of them together and in the same direction. That is what makes this hard to do, and what makes it decisive.
People
Structure
Processes
Systems
Flows
Skills
Training
It is not artificial intelligence: where the difference lies
The name can mislead, and it is worth clearing that up straight away. Transformative intelligence is not a technology and not a category of artificial intelligence. It is the organisational capacity that allows AI — or any other system — to have a real effect on everyday work. Technology is bought; this capacity is built.
Why a digitalisation project alone does not change a company
A project delivers a configured system and documented processes, and it trains the people who will have to use them. These are verifiable results and, in most cases, they are achieved. What a project cannot deliver is the evolution of the organisation receiving it: roles that are redrawn, responsibilities that shift, skills that mature, people who start putting things forward instead of waiting for instructions.
When that part does not happen, the system goes live and the company carries on working as before, with a new tool.
What involving people at every level actually means
This is the heart of the matter, and “involvement” is the most abused word in it. Involving people does not mean informing them: however well an announcement is written, it lands once the decisions are already taken, and the people receiving it can tell the difference. Real involvement shows in four things.
People are brought in while the decisions are still open.
The people who will use the system take part while there is still something to decide. After that it is communication: useful, but not the same thing.
Objections change something, at least sometimes.
If observations have never once changed a decision, people learn that fast and stop making them. Participation, at that point, becomes a formality.
Proposals come from any level, and they go somewhere.
The people closest to a process see what is not working before anyone else. That is how you recognise widespread improvement: the best ideas come from where the work is done.
Scepticism is treated as information.
People who raise objections have often seen something before anyone else. When a sceptic stops speaking, you have not solved a problem; you have lost a source of information.
When these four things happen regularly, adaptation stops being an initiative and becomes a habit. That is the point at which an organisation begins to change on its own.
How to recognise an organisation that is not evolving
Six recurring situations. When several of them appear together, the issue is usually not the tool that was chosen.
- The system is live, but the real figures are still in a spreadsheet on someone's computer.
- Decisions are taken a long way from the people who will do the work every day.
- Doubts do not surface in meetings. They surface afterwards, through informal channels.
- New technology arrives, but roles and responsibilities stay exactly as they were.
- Improvement proposals only ever come from the top.
- Six months on, it is hard to point to what has actually changed.
What an organisation with transformative intelligence does differently
Training does not stop at the people doing the work.
Roles are redrawn alongside the work.
What can be described accurately and clearly goes into the system. For the rest, someone is named as its owner.
Change shows up in the everyday work.
Transformative intelligence and AI integration in the business
Bringing artificial intelligence into processes makes the question more pressing, for a specific reason: unlike an ERP, an AI-based system changes the content of the work and not just the tools you do it with. It shifts the line between what a person decides and what a model proposes, and with it the skills required.
An organisation that does not evolve its roles, its training and its leadership adopts AI as an accessory: it ends up in the hands of the people who already knew how, and nothing moves where it was needed most.
What the evidence says about digitalisation, AI and organisational change
“70% of projects fail” is not a finding
You will find it everywhere, and it is the first number anyone quotes on this subject. It comes from an estimate its own authors called “unscientific” (Hammer and Champy, 1993). A peer-reviewed study later traced its most-cited sources and found no valid and reliable empirical evidence behind it (Hughes, Journal of Change Management, 2011). We note it because we will not be using it.
Involving people helps. On its own it is not enough.
Two meta-analyses have examined this: He and King (Journal of Management Information Systems, 2008) across 82 studies, and Schermann and Merz (ECIS proceedings, 2018) across 226 studies and 42,330 IT projects. Both find that involving the people who will use a system improves outcomes, though with a weak-to-moderate rather than decisive effect. The title of the second says the essential part: participation is necessary, but not sufficient. As far back as 1948, a field experiment (Coch and French, Human Relations) found productivity after a change to be directly proportional to the degree of participation, with turnover and conflict moving the other way.
The Italian picture
Some 76% of Italian SMEs have not invested in artificial intelligence and do not plan to, and only 7% have started structured AI training programmes for their staff (Osservatorio Innovazione Digitale nelle PMI, Politecnico di Milano, May 2026). The two figures need reading together: most Italian SMEs have not yet touched AI, and the share that has touched skills is smaller still. When the investment does come, it will land on organisations that have not prepared to receive it.
The standard academic reference has little to say about people
The concept used to study organisations capable of reconfiguring themselves is dynamic capabilities, set out by Teece, Pisano and Shuen in 1997 . It describes precisely how a firm recombines resources and competences when its environment changes, but it says very little about what happens to the people while it does. That, in our view, is where the difference is decided.
The boundary
If change leaves people behind, it is not a transformation: it is a restructuring.
These are two different movements, and they deserve two different names. An organisation can reconfigure itself very effectively while losing half of those who made it work: it happens, and sometimes there is no alternative. But it is another operation, with other costs and other results — and calling it a transformation does not make it one.
Frequently asked questions
What is transformative intelligence?
It is an organisation's capacity to evolve as a whole and in a coordinated way: people, structure, processes, systems, flows, skills, training. It is not change handed down from the top; it happens because people at every level are genuinely involved and push the change themselves.
Is transformative intelligence a form of artificial intelligence?
No, and it is not a technology either. It is the organisational capacity that allows artificial intelligence, or any other system, to have a real effect on everyday work. Technology is bought; this capacity is built.
How does transformative intelligence relate to change management?
Change management is the set of tools used to see a transition through: communication, training, sponsorship, handling resistance. Transformative intelligence is the state of the organisation that decides whether those tools work at all. It is not an alternative to change management: it contains it.
Why do many digitalisation projects fail to change how people work?
Because a project delivers a system, while the way people work depends on roles, skills and responsibilities the project has no mandate to redraw. When that part does not evolve, the system goes live and the organisation carries on as before, with a new tool.
Does it apply to every sector and every size of company?
Yes, because it does not depend on the sector but on the pace of change around it, and that pace now reaches every market. The tools and the scale differ: in a small firm, change involves a handful of people and can be very fast; in a large organisation, it requires coordination across functions. The mechanism remains the same.
How does a company build transformative intelligence?
Not through a dedicated initiative, but through the way it handles the changes it faces anyway. Open decisions to the people who will have to work with them. Let objections change something. Take proposals from every level, and extend training to the people who decide. Repeat those four things and they build it.
Why we are talking about this
We work on process digitalisation: Odoo, AI integration, custom software. We are accountable for that work — for the schedule, for the quality, for the system doing what it was designed to do. What no supplier can contractually guarantee is that the organisation will work differently afterwards. That part belongs to the people inside it, at every level.
We talk about it because we hold our work to a single measure: in the end, the client should no longer need us. An organisation able to evolve on its own no longer has that need.
Autonomy.
Where this shows up in practice
The idea lives in concrete projects. These are the three places where, in our work, you can see whether an organisation is really evolving.
Let's talk about where you are
If you are weighing up a new ERP, or bringing AI into your processes, the useful question comes before the tool: who will use it, and how they will be prepared to do so.