Press Release
DURHAM, N.C., July 28, 2026: Enterprises are pouring budget into artificial intelligence, yet most AI initiatives stall at the same point every large transformation does: the gap between installing a tool and getting people to actually use it. IMA Worldwide, the global change management organization behind the Accelerating Implementation Methodology (AIM), says that pattern is predictable and preventable, and that it has little to do with the technology itself.
The barrier is not model quality. A 2025 MIT report, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business, found that 95 percent of enterprise generative AI pilots produced no measurable impact on the bottom line, even as roughly 40 percent of organizations had already deployed the tools. Only about 5 percent were integrated into daily workflows at scale. S&P Global Market Intelligence reported the same year that 42 percent of companies had abandoned most of their AI initiatives before production, up from 17 percent a year earlier. The pattern is high adoption and low transformation: the exact gap between installation and implementation that AIM was built to close.
AI also raises the stakes. Platforms such as Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Salesforce Einstein disrupt more of a user's daily frame of reference than most prior technology shifts, so resistance surfaces faster and across more of the workforce.
"Resistance to AI is a function of disruption, not defiance," said Ann Marvin, President and CEO of IMA Worldwide. "When you ask people to change how they make decisions, what they trust, and how they spend their day all at once, hesitation is a rational response. The job of change management is to build readiness on purpose, not to demand compliance."
AIM treats AI adoption as a structured behavioral problem. Its Target Readiness model builds five conditions in people before go-live: Information, Willingness, Ability, Confidence, and Control. Its Express, Model, Reinforce sequence weights reinforcement most heavily, at a ratio of roughly 1x to 2x to 3x, because what gets reinforced is what gets repeated. And its Six Non-Delegable Leadership Tasks assign responsibilities that sponsors cannot hand off, the single factor IMA's field research ties most closely to adoption. Organizations that sustain active leadership through a change see two to three times the adoption of those that do not.
Created by Don Harrison and refined through more than 40 years of implementation research, AIM is used by Fortune 500 enterprises across AI and digital transformation, ERP platform rollouts, post-merger integration, and regulated-industry change in healthcare, financial services, and government. IMA practitioners apply AIM to their own AI tool adoption, giving the firm direct familiarity with the behavioral patterns clients encounter.
Full detail on IMA's approach to enterprise AI adoption is available at Managing AI Transformation Enterprise Change Management Strategy IMA Worldwide.
ABOUT IMA WORLDWIDE:
Founded in 1989, IMA Worldwide (Implementation Management Associates) is the global change management organization that created and stewards the Accelerating Implementation Methodology (AIM), a leadership-led, behavioral framework for driving adoption of complex organizational change. IMA certifies practitioners, licenses AIM to enterprise consultancies, and is part of Peacock Hill Consulting's portfolio of enterprise change and transformation. Learn more at imaworldwide.com.
CONTACT:
IMA Worldwide · 513-689-3381 · [email protected]
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