Real AI Adoption Is Rarer Than You Think (BCG)

Three years, roughly 400 companies, board-level access to how AI strategy actually gets made. The patterns are clearer than ever.

Matthew Kropp, Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG and Chief AI Officer at BCGx, joined host Josh Schachter for the [Un]Churned episode, "201. Why BCGx’s Chief AI Officer Thinks Writing Code By Hand Is a Waste of Time."

They cover a lot of AI bases, including why most companies are still early in their AI transformation even when adoption looks healthy, what token-based competition means for every function, and the four psychological barriers keeping smart teams from changing how they work.

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Listen on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Gainsight.com.

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🎯 The [Un]Churned Take: The Identity Crisis Impacting Your AI Adoption

Your team’s AI adoption numbers might not tell the whole story. It’s not that anyone is hiding something, but there’s a big difference between logging in and actually using AI to change how you work. Matthew Kropp, Managing Director and Senior Partner at BCG and Chief AI Officer at BCGx, has spent three years working with hundreds of companies on AI strategy. He keeps seeing the same pattern: adoption looks high on paper, but real change is rare.

He had an “aha moment” during a BCG partner meeting. A practice lead spent a month building a client strategy and presented it, but then the CEO used ChatGPT and got the same answer in 30 seconds. As he puts it in this week’s [Un]Churned podcast episode:

“What ChatGPT produces, that is the baseline. That is the starting point.”

If AI can do something, it’s no longer your differentiator. The weight of this realization is what a lot of Customer Success (CS) professionals are feeling right now, and without a clear direction, this hesitancy will impact AI adoption. What’s important now is to shift the mindset from, ‘Am I safe?’ to ‘What is it that only I can do?’

What’s Actually Blocking Your Team

When CS teams push back against AI, it’s easy to blame time, skepticism, or change fatigue. Those reasons are real, but Matthew’s research found that the deeper fear was the threat to identity.

“It’s not about ‘I’m worried about losing my job,’ it’s ‘I’m worried about losing my identity.’ And that’s a very scary thing for people.”

For CS teams, identity often comes from being the expert customers rely on. A Customer Success Manager (CSM) is the person who knows the account, manages complexity, and builds relationships. When AI starts taking over parts of that, like drafting strategies, spotting risks, or flagging renewals, it doesn’t just change the job description. It challenges the story people tell themselves about why they’re good at their work.

That’s why telling people “AI won’t replace you” doesn’t work. You can’t talk someone out of feeling their identity is threatened. The only way past it is through experience. Matthew found that everyone who gets through this process says the same thing:

“What happens every time as you get people through this process, they come to the realization that this tool is not taking something away from them, but it’s actually making them more successful and more powerful…every time they will say, I’m never going back. I love working this way. Not only can I get more done, but I’m more creative. It’s more fun. I’m not doing the toil part of my job.”

Reassurance alone doesn’t make the fear go away. It fades when people actually use the tool and see that it gives them more space to use their strengths.

Where the Job Rewrites Itself

Once the fear is gone, something interesting happens. The shift that felt threatening starts doing the work for you. When AI handles the account summary, the CSM has time for the conversation the health score missed. When it preps the QBR deck, there’s suddenly space to read on the room and drive strategic initiatives. The job redefines itself, because the toil that used to fill the day is gone.

That’s the moment the adoption metric stops mattering. Logging in was never the point. What changes is what people do with the time AI gives back, and whether they’ve gotten far enough past the identity threat to actually take it.

The teams that get there don’t look like teams that adopted AI. They look like teams doing a fundamentally different job.

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🎧 Listen for These Moments

Matt and Josh get into what’s actually holding AI adoption back and where leaders should focus instead. Listen for these moments in the full episode:

• Why AI adoption is really stalling — Matt breaks down the four biggest barriers to AI adoption: lack of time, skepticism, habit change, and the deeper identity threat underneath it.

• The “brain fry” from heavy AI use — Matt shares what happens when people work across multiple AI tools and agents at once, and why leaders need to think more carefully about overload, recovery time, and focus.

• How middle management is under pressure in AI-first orgs — a sharp discussion on how AI-native companies are rethinking coordination, spans of control, and what managers are actually expected to do.

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🔎 Where to Find the Speakers

• Matthew Kropp — LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-kropp/

• Josh Schachter — LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jschachter/

📎 Referenced in This Episode

• BCGx — BCG's engineering and AI build arm, responsible for designing and building technology solutions alongside BCG's strategy work.

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Wrapping Up

Getting through the fear is hard. What's on the other side of it is worth it.

See you next week 🧠