It’s a bit old, but still relevant because the situation hasn’t changed much: “the MIT Media Lab/Project NANDA released a new report that found that 95% of investments in gen AI have produced zero returns.”
One reason is that many companies have fallen into the “experimentation trap”:
“While experimentation is good, without a connection to the true business opportunity—e.g., transforming the core to serve existing and new customers—experiments inevitably fall short of hopes and expectations.”
The challenge is to link experimentation to exploitation i.e., to integrate learn and earn:
“The way out of this trap is to 1) understand this AI moment in the larger arc of transformation, 2) focus on AI’s potential to help better serve customers, 3) experiment with a focused set of opportunities to prove them out (with an eye toward scaling), and then 4) scale them up.”
AI is not an end in itself but a means to an end:
“All forms of AI (including gen AI) are just a tool—one of many—that can help accomplish that. Just as the internet fundamentally changed how customers are served, but not why they’re served, AI adoption needs to be seen through this laser-like focus to succeed.”
An AI strategy first answers the question of “why” and then the question of “how.”
Read this week’s good read:
👉 https://hbr.org/2025/08/beware-the-ai-experimentation-trap
