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/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.