Boston Consulting Group (BCG) vs Thoughtworks

What CMOs Get Wrong About Leading Change

In this CMSWire interview, BCG's Julia Dhar discusses why marketing transformations fail and how CMOs can better manage AI-driven change. She highlights the 'change distance' gap, where executives report positive emotions about change far more than employees (58% vs 9%). Dhar advises measuring team sentiment via short pulse surveys, avoiding false consensus by forcing specificity, and building genuine employee agency instead of theatrical town halls. She cites Michael Norton's IKEA effect, the Abilene paradox, and Delta's VELVET program as examples. The article also references Claude Hopkins's 1907 Schlitz campaign, which used specific storytelling to break through generic industry claims. Dhar's new book 'How Change Really Works' provides further insights for CMOs leading AI adoption.

• BCG survey of over 6,000 people found 58% of executives report only positive emotions about workplace change, compared to 9% of employees.
• Julia Dhar is the practice lead for the People and Organization Practice at Boston Consulting Group and co-founder of BCG's Behavioral Science Lab.
• According to Dhar, three out of four transformations fail to deliver their intended results.

BCG study: AI becomes top influence on purchases

A Boston Consulting Group (BCG) study cited by Retail-News finds artificial intelligence is rapidly gaining importance in consumers' purchase decisions. Roughly 31% of consumers already use AI during some phase of the shopping process, and respondents expect trust in AI to increase by 15 percentage points by 2030. About 19% are identified as “AI-loyalists,” and roughly 70% of those subsequently purchase products recommended by AI. The study also reports that more than half of consumers do not fully trust any single information source, that AI drives discovery of previously unknown brands, and highlights structural retail trends such as the rising share and spending power of single-person households in developed markets.

• BCG study: approximately 31% of consumers use AI in some phase of the shopping process.
• Survey respondents expect trust in AI to increase by 15 percentage points by 2030.
• About 19% of consumers are 'AI-loyalists'; roughly 70% of those buy products recommended by AI.

Thoughtworks Joins Anthropic’s Claude Network as a Select-Tier Services Partner

Thoughtworks has partnered with Anthropic to join its Claude Network as a Select-Tier Services Partner, expanding its AI capabilities.

ThoughtWorks Flags AI-Accelerated Shadow IT; Structural Fix Proposed

The ThoughtWorks Technology Radar (April 2026) called out "AI-accelerated shadow IT" under Caution. The article argues this is one visible instance of a broader cloud resource lifecycle governance problem (create, use, modify, abandon, delete) that predates AI tooling but is accelerated by it. HackerOne triage revealed S3 bucket takeover patterns where deleted resources left ghost references that attackers could exploit. The author describes a structural fix: a mechanical "specification gate" that snapshots cloud provider state and evaluates it against a catalog of safety invariants (3,000+ invariants), blocking violations across all lifecycle phases. An open-source engine (Stave) implements this approach and the author frames it as necessary to remove a two-tier system of reviewed core workflows and ungoverned shadow workflows.

• The ThoughtWorks Technology Radar (April 2026) listed "AI-accelerated shadow IT" under Caution.
• HackerOne triage found S3 bucket takeover patterns where deleted buckets left surviving references (DNS, CloudFront, application code) that attackers could claim.
• The lifecycle governance problem spans five phases: Create, Use, Modify, Abandon, Delete and predates AI tooling; AI accelerates creation but not the underlying governance gap.