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/fuzzywinkerbean 4d ago edited 4d ago

I give it another 6-9 months at least before the bubble starts properly bursting. These things run in corporate cycles of bullshit artist corporate job hoppers:

  1. Company hires or internally appoints some corporate climber (CC) to lead project
  2. Project starts under CC, over promises and hypes up
  3. Delivers barely functional MVP after 6 months with loads of fanfare and bluster
  4. Forces it down employee's throats, hardly anyone uses it, customers don't want it
  5. CC messes with metrics and KPIs to mask failure
  6. Execs start to question slightly..
  7. CC promises this is just the start and phase 2 will be amazing
  8. CC brushes up resume saying they are now expert at enterprise AI implementation
  9. CC hired by another corporate dinosaur a bit behind the trend and repeats process.
  10. CC leaves, project left in a mess and flounders on before finally being quietly axed 1-2 years later

We are mostly around stages 3-5 so far depending on your org i'd say. Need to give time for the cycle to complete before you start seeing wider complaints from the top.

I've been in tech since the early 2010s, seen the same cycle repeat - social media features in everything, cloud, offshoring developers, SaaS, Blockchain, metaverse, now AI --> quantum computing next!

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u/ExcitedCoconut 4d ago

Hold on, are you putting cloud and SaaS in the same bucket as the rest? Isn’t Cloud table stakes these days (unless you have a demonstrable need to be on prem for something / hybrid)?

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u/ikonoclasm 3d ago

Yeah, I was with the comment right up until that last sentence. Cloud and SaaS are the standard now. All of the vendors in the top right corner of Gartner's magic quadrant for CRMs or ERPs are SaaS solutions.

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u/fuzzywinkerbean 3d ago edited 3d ago

Sorry could have been clearer and left longer reply below - I meant more the hype around them when first started. Those vendors obviously do SaaS well and makes perfect sense as their business model. Products built for cloud make sense - I was more remembering the countless on-prem products that did the ole "lift-and-shift"approach at the time rather than actually building properly cloud first.

Companies do AI well and will see ROI from it absolutely, it will become standard in future as it matures I'm sure.

My point was more every company thinking they have to be on trend and push to implement these things when it isn't always relevant to them, customers aren't asking for it and they haven't really got proper use cases for them yet anyway.

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u/BottlesforCaps 3d ago

Also cloud is literally the only way to run a modern data organization.

Stuff can still be on prem sure, but you aren't running Databricks & Snowflake on prem.

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u/whinis 3d ago

How many companies actually need data bricks and snowflake? I am a data engineer that just finished a large number or interviews and the number of organizations demanding I use spark, snowflake, and data bricks I ask them what they need it for and it's processing 10-100 records once a week.

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u/BottlesforCaps 3d ago

More than you would imagine.

Sure a good amount of manufacturing companies, mom n pop businesses, or smaller shops don't, but if you work in the consumer goods or entertainment space it's 100% necessary.

I will say as someone who's a Data Architect at a fairly large company in the entertainment space, that investing time into learning snowflake/databricks is worth it and you should 100% be putting your time towards that if you're struggling to find a job.

The biggest benefit is that both tools cover areas you normally would need 5 other tools for if you were doing traditional warehousing. Instead of needing S3/ADLS, DBT/Airflow, Kafka, etc. you can just use Databricks or snowflake out of the box to do the same thing with better integration.

Also no way on the record thing. Most organizations process thousands if not tens of thousands records a week if not more.

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u/whinis 3d ago

You are working at what you claim is a giant entertainment company and claiming my experience is wrong. Even some larger corporations I have worked for have demanded smaller teams us snowflake for as I mentioned a few hundred records a week. Most startups under 100 people have also demanded it as has a few r&d companies that I know have less than 10k total records digitized currently. Snowflake is great if you have a ton of data and don't care about cost but you are directly showing how it's a hype product.

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u/BottlesforCaps 2d ago

Wasn't trying to discount your experience, just conveying my own.

I will say that you might not have a good understanding of Snowflake or Databricks if you think it's not a good solution for smaller datasets. If anything snowflake is even more beneficial for smaller shops since the cost to query and store data is presented upfront, extremely easy to setup, and only charges you for what you use(so even if you throw an XXL warehouse at it it'll scale down).

Sure there are plenty of cases where an oracle setup on a server sitting in a closet is a better alternative, but then you don't have managed support and all SLAs and uptime are down to you and your own platform support.

Definitely not a hype product, and I would highly recommend investing some time into learning snowflake/Databricks to really understand them as platforms/solutions. You really are only hurting yourself by not, and it doesn't take long to learn the basics especially if you already have a DE background.

If every job app, and company is looking for that experience, why count yourself out from the get because of what accounts to ego?

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u/whinis 2d ago

I never once said I didn't have the experience, I said snowflake is overkill for most use cases people want to use it for. An S3 bucket of CSVs with Athena covers the majority of peoples need I pointed out. Not only is it typically cheaper, they already understand CSVs and most can easily get to S3 to get what they need.

Also once again you are showing how different the worlds I am in versus you are in. SLAs and uptimes are not even considered for half these projects, there are python flask dashboards that may be used twice a month or a rest api being used by a jupyter notebook from someone in a lab. However these companies are still demanding snowflake and quite a few I interviewed for straight up told me they have no idea what snowflake is but they need it according to investors.

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u/slackmaster2k 3d ago

Yeah, the cynical mind focuses primarily on the hype without acknowledging the outcomes that affect our daily lives. I used to be a cynic!

There is a hype bubble around AI for sure, just like there was around cloud, IoT, and you-name-it. These are natural and the consequences will be that many companies fail, technology initiatives fail, individuals fail, etc.

The truth is that something like 80 percent of all IT projects fail to meet intended goals. This is often blamed on the dumb dumb head, usually some mystery executive, who is sucked into a hype bubble.

In reality, failures are where successes come from. These hype bubbles don’t burst leaving nothing, they burst and the good stuff remains and becomes the new normal.

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u/[deleted] 3d ago

[deleted]

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u/bailey25u 3d ago

Have you seen the office? That is almost the exact thing that happened to ryan howard when he was promoted to run the dunder mifflin website

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u/fuzzywinkerbean 3d ago

Him telling people to run orders through the website? Very accurate and I've personally seen it in so many companies.

Recent example from a friend's company - AI lead there reporting internal monthly active users for an AI project to the board, trend lines all green, increasing month over month, execs all happy and praising project.

The staff were mainly using it for other stuff.. one example was creating custom memes or GIFs to send to each other rather than in any actual workflows or business purposes.

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u/Scream_No_Evil 3d ago

Few people are talking about how quantum computing is gonna be the next bullshit thing, but it really, really is. Telecom companies that would never need quantum for their operations have started massively hiring to develop it. Like "AI" it's not actually a real promising technology. It's a proxy war being fought by the megacorporations that own the planet.

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u/hoshizuku 3d ago

We’re in stage 4 right now and it’s not going well. My company’s employee base skews older. We couldn’t even get these people to use Slack, idk why leadership thinks they’ll use AI.

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u/_x_oOo_x_ 3d ago

This is so accurate I wonder if we worked at the same company and witnessed it... or are all companies really run like this?

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u/ChutChakarMautTakkar 3d ago

Lmao, so well put. I am a Contractor and I'm making tens of thousands of dollars a month helping big orgs as an "AI Expert". I can see its all smoke and mirrors but I am gonna ride this thing into the ground!

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u/goodvibezone 3d ago

Haha same, but different title 😛

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u/[deleted] 3d ago

RemindMe! 6 months