95% of AI pilot projects fail (www.forbes.com)

MIT Media Lab’s “State of AI in Business 2025” finds that 95% of corporate AI pilots deliver zero measurable return: only ~5% of custom/embedded tools reach production with impact. The study reviewed 300+ public initiatives, 52 organizational interviews and 153 executive surveys, and shows the failure isn’t primarily a modeling problem. While >80% of firms have explored general LLMs and ~40% report deployments, most projects remain pilots or generate visible but shallow activity—especially in sales and marketing, which absorb 50–70% of budgets but yield weaker ROI than back-office automation (procurement, finance, operations). For the AI/ML community, the report underscores that deployment success hinges on strategy, integration and organizational design more than model quality. Externally partnered deployments succeed about twice as often as internal builds (67% vs 33%), and common failure modes include misaligned incentives, poor process-mapping, disconnected data, lack of feedback loops, and tools that don’t fit daily workflows or ERP/CRM stacks. Operational wins—lead qualification +40%, retention +10%, multi-million-dollar BPO and risk-check savings—come from embedding AI into systems and change management, not trend-chasing demos. The takeaway: focus on measurable use cases, systems integration, cross-functional alignment, and experienced implementation to translate models into lasting business value.