Classic change management frameworks were built for a world where the bottleneck was human capacity. You need people to learn new tools, adopt new processes, and execute the work. ADKAR—Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, Reinforcement—guides people through that transition: understand why change matters, want to participate, learn how, develop the ability, and sustain the new way of working.

That model assumes the scarce resource is human effort. When AI agents can write most of the code, ship prototypes in hours, and automate workflows that used to take teams months, the bottleneck shifts. The question is no longer “can we build it?” but “do we want it? is it right? does it cohere with everything else we’re building?”

What Breaks

Traditional change management optimizes for getting humans to adopt new tools and behaviors. The resistance we’re trained to expect—fear of the unknown, inertia, loss of competence—still exists. But it’s layered on top of something deeper: a shift in what we’re asking people to do.

We’re not asking developers to write more code faster. We’re asking them to orchestrate, evaluate, and decide. We’re not asking product managers to spec more features. We’re asking them to judge what matters and what doesn’t. The work changes. The change management playbook, built for incremental adoption of new tools, wasn’t designed for role redefinition.

The New Scarce Resource

When agents do the execution, the scarce resource becomes judgment. Strategy. Coherence. Learning from what ships. The teams that thrive aren’t the ones who adopt AI fastest—they’re the ones who reorganize around the work that only humans can do.

Change management in this world isn’t just about adoption. It’s about shifting identity. From “I am someone who writes code” to “I am someone who shapes what gets built.” From “I manage the backlog” to “I ensure we’re solving the right problem.” That’s a different kind of awareness, desire, and ability than ADKAR was originally designed for.

Where We Go From Here

Over the next two years, we’ll explore how ADKAR translates to the agent era—and where it needs to evolve. Awareness becomes understanding not just that change is coming, but what changes when the bottleneck shifts. Desire becomes genuine buy-in to a world where craft matters more than queue management. Knowledge and Ability center on judgment, orchestration, and coherence. Reinforcement means sustaining the habits that keep humans in the loop where they add value.

The frameworks we inherited weren’t wrong. They were built for different assumptions. It’s time to re-examine them from first principles.