Tue 2 Sep 2025
The MIT report showing that 95% of companies achieved no benefits from the billions spent on (mostly pilot) AI implementations continues to reverberate widely across the internet (and especially on antisocial media). Commenters typically treat it as proof that AI is just hype that won’t fundamentally change anything in the world. My opinion, however, is completely different.
You see, with my 35+ years of experience in the industry – experience that includes being a consultant who helps support large organizations with various “transformations” and “implementations” of modern management methods – I’ve seen such reports and headlines before. It was the same in the early days of the Internet, it was the same when the first wave of e-commerce crashed (the “dot-com bubble”), and it had to be the same this time too.
Why? Because large organizations (and these are the subject of “management science” specialists’ studies) – or more precisely, their management cadre – are organically incapable of grasping major change and innovation. When there’s a new hype – a management method, a technology – managers typically don’t spend time getting acquainted with its essence. Instead, they quickly order someone to “do something with it” while simultaneously promising their bosses various spectacular results. This causes subordinates – who usually have just as little more clue about this new thing – to make clumsy and superficial moves. The results are such that first they report upward that we already “have that something” – and the effects are exactly what the aforementioned MIT report shows.
All of this is subordinated to the most important principle of large organizations: an orientation toward maintaining the status quo, which by definition implies resistance to change. This is among the reasons why various simple methods and promises have always enjoyed such popularity, while real application of advanced approaches to organizational change (here one might mention Professor Snowden’s work) is so difficult and rare to encounter – because simply put, real change threatens too many comfortable positions.
Therefore, in my eyes, this report in no way diminishes the power of AI technology or its potential to change not only the industry but the entire world we live in. It’s rather another confirmation that the average level of change and innovation management in most large companies is low. Zero surprises there.
Over time, of course, just like the Internet and then e-commerce, AI will become an inseparable, integral part of these companies’ operations. However, a sufficiently long time must pass, and before that happens, we’re in for the bursting of the “inflated expectations bubble.”