New research puts a hard number on something a lot of IT leaders already suspected. Most AI pilots never make it into production, and the spend behind them isn’t disappearing, it’s just sitting in limbo. Jon Bitz, chief relationship officer and co-founder at KloudStax, says that limbo isn’t the failure it looks like from the outside.
The numbers keep landing in the same neighborhood no matter who’s counting. Forrester’s latest research on agentic AI found that three-quarters of enterprise leaders say they’re adopting it, but only a small minority have it running in anything beyond limited pilots. Gartner predicts that through 2026, organizations will abandon 60 percent of AI projects that aren’t backed by AI-ready data and integration infrastructure. And Deloitte’s own enterprise survey found that more than a third of companies are still using AI at a surface level, with little real change to how they actually work day to day.
Put those together and a pattern starts to form. Enterprises are approving AI budgets faster than they’re converting that spend into anything resembling a repeatable, working system, and the gap between the two has become one of the more uncomfortable open questions in enterprise cloud right now.
