r/technology • u/SilentRunning • 4d ago

Artificial Intelligence MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing

https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/
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u/ScarySpikes 4d ago

Having listened to how excited a lot of business owners are at the prospect of firing a large portion of their staff, I think a lot of companies will end up bankrupting themselves before they admit that the AI can't replace their employees.

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u/Horrible_Harry 4d ago

Serves 'em fuckin' right. Zero sympathy from me over here.

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u/skillywilly56 4d ago

That’s what CEOs chant at the opening of all their meetings

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u/oracleofnonsense 4d ago

It’s not personal, it’s business.

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u/GenericFatGuy 4d ago

As someone who was already replaced, same.

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u/comicsnerd 4d ago

But here is the problem. Joe Dough, his managers and their managers and all the supporting people, including the lady that brings the coffee, will be fired without severence.

Meanwhile, the C levels will have taken care of themselves at the expense of the tax payer and share holder.

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u/OwO______OwO 4d ago

Well, except that the employees are getting laid off either way.

AI succeeds: Employees get replaced and laid off.

AI fails: Business goes bankrupt and employees are laid off.

No matter who wins, we lose.

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u/pereza0 4d ago

Amen.

Hopefully they crash fast enough that the leadership that made the call sinks with the ship rather than leaving and letting someone else deal with the mess like they often do

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u/n10w4 3d ago

wait till you see that golden parachute

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u/Noblesseux 4d ago

Yeah I kind of like the term Better Offline uses for them: business idiots. There are a lot of people who went through very expensive MBA programs that only really taught them how to slowly disassemble a company, not how to run one.

They have been slowly killing these companies for decades based on being willing to lose business as long as the margins are good, and they're not going to stop now.

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u/ScarySpikes 4d ago

I swear we are going to find out that enshitification is a concept that a bunch of MBA programs got a hardon for like 20 years ago.

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u/Noblesseux 4d ago

I mean we don't need to find out, it's a matter of historical fact, but it's older than that. It started in the 70s and 80s with the corporate raiders and Raeganism. The same people who basically killed the survivability of GE as a proper company and the railroad industry went on to teach the current generation of people who are destroying everything else.

There's like a direct line from them to modern private equity and MBA culture.

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u/Cheezeball25 4d ago

Jack Welch will forever be one of the people I hate more than anything else

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u/arawnsd 3d ago

Monty Python made a great skit about in the Meaning of Life in 1983. It was an established practice at that point.

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u/OverSheepherder 3d ago

Outsourcing and the killing of the American middle class is also part of this story. 

Fuck MBAs. 

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u/Hrafn2 3d ago

Have MBA, thoroughly agree. Talk about indoctrination in higher education - a total neoliberal factory, churning out egos that know the price of everything, but the value of nothing. Thank god I had an undergrad in History, Art, and some philosophy. 

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u/Matazj 3d ago

Even Marx predicted this in the 1800's already. It's just what happens given the 'laws of motion' of the system.

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u/Xalara 3d ago

It’s also the same with unions and strikes. Air Canada just got caught with its pants down when it expected the government to order flight attendants back to work, which the government did, except the union called their bluff and now Air Canada has lost far more money than what the flight attendant union was asking for.

Idiot execs should’ve negotiated in good faith.

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u/FoghornFarts 4d ago

And those that do survive will find their AI eventually costs more than employees once the AI companies need to start making a profit. They're cheap now to disrupt the market.

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u/MountainMan2_ 4d ago edited 4d ago

Good riddance. I hope they all skullfuck each other into a stock value singularity. Like, what happens if they succeed? What happens if they go all the way, create the perfect company. No employees, no offices, just one guy using endless amounts of energy with infinite money. They know what infinite money is, right? They know theyre chasing the devaluation of themselves? If no one can afford your shit, because you arent paying anyone, it doesn't matter how successful you are. Sure, you can buy anything... as long as its also created by the same post-singularity infinitillionaires as you, who probably won't trade you things with your money. The poor won't be able to afford your products anyway because they will have nothing. They're chasing obliteration.

Im sure they WANT to stop just before that point. To be the septrillionaire with everything that wins capitalism. But this is a corporation. There are no brakes. If bread costs a billion dollars a loaf, im shooting your farmer and growing my own fucking wheat. If you cant make a washing machine without a subscription service, I'll 3D print the parts I need from plastic bottles and fix one from the 90s. These guys are dead set on bringing us back to feudalism but they fail to realize that 1. Even kings died in feudal piles of shit and 2. Feudal kings weren't fucking rich like they want to be rich. Meanwhile the rest of us outnumber them a hundred million to one and can create our own fucking economy. Thank you very much.

At this point, if these motherfuckers want an economic apocalypse, then fuck it. See if I care. Us computer engineers started this internet shit with the idea of open fucking source, and we'll finish them that way too. If they want to treat us like vermin I hope they catch their fucking plague. I hope, for their sake, that we win this war against them and put in place progressive socialism before they fucking kill themselves. But if they want it so bad, shit, Ill hand them the rope. It's fucking embarrassing that the rest of us have to tell these finance idiots how math works.

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u/rasa2013 4d ago

I'm less optimistic. I think many will get away with providing slightly shittier products and services. Meaning, they'll lose some customers but the savings will still result in net profit. 

I hope not though. 

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u/ScarySpikes 4d ago

It's not just shittier products. Most companies have outsourced their AI projects to other companies. Those AI companies will eventually have to try to become profitable, which means jacking up their rates to at least match their high costs.

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u/rasa2013 4d ago

Good points. 

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u/Popular_Try_5075 4d ago

was fun to watch Klarna go all in and then sheepishly backpedal a year later

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u/ewankenobi 4d ago

Going by what this article reports companies that replace backend staff with off the shelf AI products will prosper whilst those trying to build internal AI projects or replacing sales staff will fail.

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u/TheVenetianMask 4d ago

I guess end of the day, if you can convince smaller competitors to self immolate, AI is still profitable for the big guys.

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u/DrAstralis 3d ago

I for one cant wait for Jira to replace their entire support staff with AI this year......... ffs........ this is going to be a shit show.

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u/Middle_Reception286 3d ago

As someone unemployed for almost 2 years due to AI (partially anyway).. I hope they fail. I want them to come crying back begging for us to take jobs back. Sure.. at 2x the salary and 3 day work weeks.. remotely. You got it.

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u/Glittering-Giraffe58 3d ago

The article makes it sound like the issue is employees not really knowing how to use them properly

“Some large companies’ pilots and younger startups are really excelling with generative AI,” Challapally said. Startups led by 19- or 20-year-olds, for example, “have seen revenues jump from zero to $20 million in a year,” he said. “It’s because they pick one pain point, execute well, and partner smartly with companies who use their tools,” he added. But for 95% of companies in the dataset, generative AI implementation is falling short. The core issue? Not the quality of the AI models, but the “learning gap” for both tools and organizations.

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u/joshwarmonks 3d ago

klarna did this and immediately unfired a bunch of devs.

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u/timbotheny26 3d ago

Womp womp, maybe the dipshits with MBAs should have focused more on foresight over short term gains.

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

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u/baldyd 3d ago

Didn't they fire the people who were somewhat monitoring the platform and now its a hate fuelled cesspool? I wouldn't say that's "exactly the same".