According to the now well publicized MIT-affiliated research and reporting, fewer than 5% of enterprise AI pilots ever deliver measurable business value. The other 95%? They’re still stuck in what we call AI Purgatory: exciting demos, scattered pilots, and vanishing trust.
For the past couple of years, corporate leaders have been sprinting into the AI era with a mixture of urgency and anxiety. Boards are calling. Investors are asking. Competitors are announcing. And CIOs, under immense pressure, have responded the only way they knew how, by launching pilots. Lots of them.
Across company after company we see the same pattern: 30, 50, even hundreds of AI pilots scattered across functions and owned by individual enthusiasts rather than enterprise leaders. Some organizations publicly reference numbers in the hundreds; one global healthcare company announced more than 900. It gives the illusion of momentum. It produces exciting demos. It certainly calms a board, at least temporarily. But it doesn’t create value.
This is AI Purgatory with exciting activity but no real escape path to transformation. The danger isn’t just wasted spend. It’s the erosion of trust: with the board, with the C-suite, with the workforce that’s already skeptical and fearful about the future.
