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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25677 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration; the vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P&L.

If this study is trustworthy, the promise of AI appears to be less concrete and less imminent than many would hope or fear.

This seems like an extremely odd metric to support the argument that you are making.

At the very least, to use the 5% success rate to understand AI's revolutionary potential, we need to know what the average value unlocked in those 5% of successes is, and the average cost across the whole dataset. If the costs are minimal, and the returns are 100x costs for the successes, then even if only 5% succeed every single company should be making that bet.

On top of that, what's the timeline function? When were these programs launched? How long have they been going on? Are the older programs more successful than the the newer ones? If most of the 5% are over a year old, while most of the 95% are less than a year old, we might be judging unripe tomatoes here.

Then, add to that, there's value in having institutional knowledge and expertise about AI. By having employees who understand AI, even if the pilot program fail, they'll see opportunities to implement it in the future and understand how to integrate it into their workflow.

It just seems odd to declare AI dead based off this data.

I’d be curious to know what type of businesses that 5% were used at. It might be good for things like writing boilerplate news and bad at ad copy. It might be good at picking up trends in engineering and business to business stuff and not so good at picking the new fashion trends.

It just seems odd to declare AI dead based off this data.

I may have miscommunicated here. I don't think it's dead. I think it'll be useful on a much longer time horizon than was predicted, and not in a way that we expected. The slope of enlightenment is next.

Fair, I probably misinterpreted your post.

But still, I don't even know if that data said it isn't useful! If I published an article telling you that I ran the numbers, and the 40-1 bets on UFC fights hit 5% of the time, that would be a huge gambling tip telling you to bet on the longshots.

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