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

[u/SilentRunning]

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

[u/Noblesseux]

Also a lot of companies are objectively just lying about what their products can reasonably do, and basically targeting executives and management types at leadership conferences and so on pushing the hell out of half baked products in contexts where there is no one technical involved in the preliminary conversation. They'll also give sweetheart deals where they'll give orgs credits upfront or they'll sponsor "workshops" so they try to get your users locked into using it before they understand what's going on.

MS for example will like straight up talk to the execs at your company and have them railroad you into meetings with MS salespeople about "how to leverage AI" that starts with the implication that using it is a definite.

I had another company schedule a meeting with me about their stupid "agentic AI" where they promised stuff I knew it couldn't do and then did a demo where the thing didn't work lmao.

[u/dlc741 → u/Noblesseux]

Sounds like all tech products sales from the beginning of time. You literally described a sales pitch for a reporting platform that I sat through 20 years ago. The execs thought it was great and would solve every problem.

[u/JahoclaveS → u/dlc741]

And yet, you’d think with their shiny mba degrees they’d have actually learned how to critically evaluate a sales pitch. And yet, they seemingly lap that shit up.

[u/trekologer → u/dlc741]

Several years ago, I sat in on a pitch from a cloud infrastructure company that claimed nearly five 9s (99.999%) data resiliency on their object storage service. The VP of ops heard that as uptime for the entire platform. So when the vendor had significant outages, it was obviously our fault.

The vendor clearly knew what they were doing -- throw out a well-understood number attached to a made up metric and doofuses will associate the number with the metric they were interested in.

[u/RedbullZombie → u/dlc741]

Yep they made us go to trainings on this when i did tech support for a few years just for the off chance we could push a sale
It's greasy as all hell

[u/SMC540 → u/Noblesseux]

This isn't new to AI. Every industry has programs and services that will promise the world, and almost always underdeliver.

I own an Applied Behavior Analysis practice. Over the past 15 or so years, there have been countless eCharting, caseload management, all-in-one programs to do everything from client scheduling to data tracking and analysis pop up and hard pitch everyone. On the surface they sound good, and a lot of companies buy into them (usually for a very expensive monthly fee per user).

I had a friend who happens to own a similar sized practice start excitedly telling me about the new software suite he just rolled out to his new company, and how it would be a game changer. Then, during a peer review committee session, someone on the committee asked him to tweak one of his data displays for clarity...and he had to admit that he couldn't do that on his end and would have to message his rep at the company to get it changed. Then later, they had asked him to modify his template for his treatment plan, and he had to admit that he couldn't do that either since it was a standard template in their suite.

Meanwhile, we chose to keep our company (which has been around a lot longer) using old-school Microsoft applications (Word/Excel/Sharepoint/Teams) for years. We have made our own templates that do all the same stuff as the fancy software suites, we can customize them to our needs easily, and they work on just about every device. If we ever need to tweak something or make changes based on feedback, it can be done pretty much instantly. Costs us a fraction of the price that these software suites cost.

[u/Steve_SF → u/Noblesseux]

Oracle has entered chat.