Organisational Change Manager — AI Adoption (Copilot)

Practice

Advisory & Change Enablement, Avanade India

Location

Bengaluru/NCR, India (Hybrid, with client travel)

Experience

10–14 years overall in organisational change management, adoption and enablement, with proven delivery of at least one enterprise-wide Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot or comparable technology rollout — from executive sponsorship through to measured end-user adoption

Role Summary

Avanade India is looking for an Organisational Change Manager to own the people side of AI adoption on our client engagements. Training alone does not change how an organisation works; this role exists to make sure that once we have enabled a client on M365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot or the wider AI toolset, the organisation actually adopts it — from the leadership team down to every team that has to change how it works day to day.

You will design and run the change and adoption programme end to end: stakeholder and impact assessment, sponsorship and leadership alignment, a change champion network, communications and campaigns, role-based enablement alongside our technical trainers, resistance management, and adoption measurement against agreed outcomes. The role is strongly client-facing — you will be in the room with sponsors and executives one week and running floor-level workshops the next — and it carries a presales element, shaping the change and adoption workstream in Avanade’s AI proposals.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the change management and adoption strategy for client AI engagements, using a recognised methodology (Prosci ADKAR, Kotter or equivalent) rather than an improvised approach.

• Run change impact and readiness assessments — who is affected, how their work changes, where the resistance will sit, and what the organisation is capable of absorbing.

• Secure and sustain executive sponsorship: work directly with CxO, business unit head and functional leadership to agree the case for change, the adoption ambition and their visible role in it.

• Coach leaders and people managers so they can lead the change with their own teams — one-to-one executive coaching, sponsor briefings and manager toolkits.

• Build and run a change champion network across business units and geographies, and keep it active through the life of the programme.

• Design and deliver the communications plan — launch campaigns, leadership messages, newsletters, weekly nudges, intranet and Viva content — written in plain language for the people receiving it.

• Define role-based adoption journeys and persona-specific use cases (for example sales, finance, HR and operations for M365 Copilot; developers, leads and QA for GitHub Copilot) so each group sees value in their own work.

• Work alongside the technical trainers and Copilot Studio team: shape the curriculum, sequence the enablement, and make sure training lands where the change plan says it should.

• Facilitate workshops, floor-walks, drop-in clinics, champion sessions and leadership forums, including full-day workshops with large groups.

• Establish the adoption baseline and measurement framework — usage and adoption dashboards (M365 Copilot adoption reports, Viva Insights, GitHub Copilot metrics), sentiment surveys and business outcome measures — and report progress against it.

• Identify and manage resistance and blockers actively, escalating what needs leadership intervention rather than letting adoption quietly stall.

• Address the concerns that come with AI specifically — job impact, trust in outputs, data security and responsible AI — honestly and in the organisation’s own language, in step with the client’s policy and governance teams.

• Embed sustainment: hand over the champion network, the content, the measurement approach and the operating rhythm so adoption continues after the engagement closes.

• Support presales and pursuits — shaping the change and adoption workstream, effort and approach, and presenting it in client workshops and proposals.

• Contribute reusable change assets, playbooks, campaign kits and templates to the practice IP library.

Required Skills & Experience

• 10–14 years of overall experience in organisational change management, adoption and enablement, with a substantial recent focus on technology-driven change.

• Certified change management practitioner — Prosci ADKAR or equivalent; formal methodology is a requirement, not a preference.

• Proven delivery of at least one enterprise-wide adoption programme end to end, ideally Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot or a comparable AI or digital workplace rollout.

• Demonstrated ability to work with senior leadership — securing sponsorship, running executive sessions, coaching leaders one to one, and holding a credible conversation with a CxO.

• Experience cascading change from leadership through middle management to end users, and building and sustaining a change champion network across a distributed organisation.

• Strong group facilitation — comfortable running multi-hour workshops with large groups, not just presenting slides.

• Strong writing skills — adoption campaigns, leadership communications, newsletters and nudges produced continuously, in plain language rather than consultancy prose.

• Measurement literacy — able to set a baseline, work with adoption dashboards and tie activity to business outcomes rather than to attendance numbers.

• Microsoft 365 fluency sufficient to demonstrate Copilot confidently and discuss real use cases; comfortable with the AI subject matter even though the technical build sits with the delivery team.

• Experience working with resistance, cultural differences and business units that respond to very different things.

• Excellent spoken and written English, and the confidence to hold a room of senior client stakeholders.

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Preferred / Good to Have

• Prosci certification specifically, plus a second credential such as CCMP, APMG Change Management or an agile change qualification.

• Experience with GitHub Copilot adoption in engineering organisations — developer workflow change, measurement and engineering leadership engagement.

• Awareness of Copilot Studio, agents and the wider Microsoft AI stack, sufficient to position what is possible.

• Familiarity with responsible AI, data governance and acceptable-use policy work, and with the questions employees raise about AI and job impact.

• Learning and development background — curriculum design, train-the-trainer, or building enablement content.

• Experience in large federated or multi-entity organisations (many semi-autonomous business units, campuses or geographies).

• Industry depth in one or more of BFSI, manufacturing, healthcare, energy, retail, public sector or higher education.

• Experience in a consulting, global delivery or SI environment (Avanade, Accenture, or similar), including presales contribution.

• Willingness to travel to client sites across India and the region as the programme requires.

• Prior contribution to reusable change playbooks, adoption frameworks or practice-building initiatives.

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