ai projects that wrote down a number before anyone bought anything succeed 54 percent of the time. the ones that did not succeed 12 percent of the time.

the condition is a purchase made on the strength of a demo, where the case for the tool is that it is obviously going to help and obviously is carrying the whole argument. the cost shows up two quarters later as four subscriptions, a shared login, and no way to say whether any of it worked, which is the same reason 61 percent of these projects were approved on a return nobody ever went back and measured.

the fake fix is a heavier process: a scoring matrix, a pilot committee, a vendor bake-off that runs six weeks and produces a slide, all of it expensive and none of it the variable in the data. what moves the number is one line written before money moves, naming which figure this is supposed to change, what that figure reads today, and the date you will look at it again. hours in the approval queue, cost per ticket, days to invoice, pick the one your business actually feels. a tool with a number attached either earns its renewal or gets cancelled in a quarter, and both of those outcomes are worth more than the one you have now, which is a feeling and a card on file.