The Story
A Career Built on Making Change Actually Stick
Most AI rollouts succeed at deployment and fail at adoption. Not because the tools are bad. Because we’re handing a faster wheel to people already running fast and getting nowhere. They’re afraid of what AI use will mean for their performance review. They can’t focus on learning new behaviors when nothing’s been removed from their workload. And they’re stuck on the gerbil track of doing more with less, where AI just makes the wheel spin faster. Ann Marvin diagnoses why behavior actually stalls inside enterprise AI initiatives, and the structural change-management discipline that closes the gap.
Ann Marvin has spent more than three decades answering one stubborn question: why do so many well-funded, well-intentioned transformations fail to land? The answer, she’ll tell you, is rarely strategy. It’s almost always execution, and execution is a human problem disguised as a project-management problem.
Ann’s path into change management was anything but conventional. She started in technology, earning a BS in Computer Science from Rochester Institute of Technology, and spent her early career inside large-scale systems implementations where she watched brilliant technical rollouts collapse under the weight of organizational resistance. That experience pushed her toward the business side of transformation. She went on to earn her MBA from the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester, where she began formalizing the instincts she’d developed in the field: that sustained change requires an engineered approach to the human dynamics of adoption, not a training plan bolted onto a go-live date.
Disciplined change methodology and agile delivery are usually treated as opposites. In practice, they work best together.
Over the following decades, Ann led transformation engagements across telecommunications, insurance, financial services, and professional consulting, partnering with leadership teams at organizations ranging from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 enterprises. She earned her AIM Master certification and became a Certified SAFe Advanced Practice Consultant, an unusually practical pairing in a field that often treats structured change methodology and agile delivery as opposites. More recently, she collaborated with Comparative Agility on an Implementation History Assessment tool designed to help organizations understand their own change-readiness patterns before they launch the next initiative.
In 2024, Ann acquired IMA Worldwide, becoming the steward of more than 40 years of AIM intellectual property and client history. Under her leadership, Peacock Hill Consulting and IMA Worldwide now operate as a single practice focused on turning complex strategies into measurable, sustained results: post-merger integration, agile transformation, and enterprise-scale change adoption. She is a frequent contributor to industry conversations on why change initiatives stall and what it takes to restart them, and her perspective has been featured on podcasts covering organizational transformation and adoption dynamics.
Ann is based in Durham, North Carolina.
The AI vertical is where Ann’s combination of experience compounds most usefully. Most change-management voices haven’t worked agile delivery; most agile voices haven’t worked structural change. Ann holds AIM Master plus SAFe Advanced Practice Consultant credentials in deliberate combination, because the methodologies most enterprises treat as opposites are actually complementary, and AI rollouts need both. Behavior change requires the structural rigor AIM provides. Iterative learning requires the cadence SAFe provides. Ann’s diagnosis of the AI adoption gap is direct: fear, focus, and the gerbil track of running fast and getting nowhere. That trio sits at the intersection of those two disciplines. The fix isn’t more training or more tools. It’s changing the shape of the wheel before adding the load.
Acquired by Peacock Hill Consulting
