95% of enterprise ai pilots never show up on the p&l. the demo was the product.

mit put a number on what buyers have been feeling for two years: 95% of enterprise genai pilots deliver no measurable roi, and an entire demo economy lives inside that gap. the condition is simple to name, pilots get designed to impress the room rather than to move a number, so they end the only way they can, in a deck about learnings. the cost is not the pilot budget, it is two quarters of calendar, the integration hours your own people burned, and the internal credibility the next attempt now has to buy back at a premium.

the fake fix is another pilot with a newer model, which restarts the same clock with the same missing scoreboard. do the version that holds: before anything starts, write the one number the pilot has to move and the date it has to move by, then ask the vendor for a customer twelve months in production and call that customer yourself. a vendor with real deployments hands you the reference by end of day, and one selling demos schedules another demo.