95 per cent of organisations are getting zero return from AI according to MIT (opens in new tab)

(ft.com)

30 pointsantithesizer7mo ago14 comments

14 comments

https://archive.is/20250819203728/https://www.ft.com/content...

Nah. My wife is in finance at a pretty well known startup. She has been buzzing about how some AI products she's worked with have made direct impacts on her bottom line. She's been using Enterprise ChatGPT and she loves it. I think there's plenty of opportunity in places like finance where projects are limited by headcount and bandwidth, and creating features for long-tail work.

JohnFen7mo ago

While I doubt that statistic as well, the pedant in me is duty-bound to point out that your wife seeing a return on its use is not actually very strong evidence counter to the claim that 95% of organizations are not. She might just be in the 5%.

ojosilva7mo ago

Careful, the underlying report is saying 95% of enterprise AI automation systems are not giving measurable results for AI projects, and:

- does not include individual use of ChatGPT, Claude, etc (called shadow AI economy in the paper)

- in-house AI tools fail 2x more often than external AI solutions

- finance and other backoffice departments are the ones seeing noticeable performance gains with AI use

- lack of AI adaptability, memory and evolution over time is making it hard for humans to adapt to AI when it should be the other way around

- users prefer the chat interface, not your AI-enabled webapp

- 90% of users prefer humans (duh) for mission-critical work

1 more reply

antithesizerOP7mo ago

Completely agree. There was a similar report published last year, lots of fluff, seemingly tailor made to scare retail investors. FT's quality has really taken a hit in recent years. It's sad to see them publishing nonsense like this.

A more evenhanded take on the same report:

https://www.axios.com/2025/08/18/ai-jobs-layoffs

toomuchtodo7mo ago

https://nanda.media.mit.edu/ai_report_2025.pdf

https://web.archive.org/web/20250818145714/https://nanda.med...

antithesizerOP7mo ago

first link is broken

toomuchtodo7mo ago

Included for completeness, breakage is known.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941536

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44940944

lvspiff7mo ago

I think some of it is the return is hidden. Things that took people an hour now taking half that. Presentations that were bland are now improving. The fact I can do some quick analysis of some data then analyze it in a number of ways for insights makes me more efficient.

Instead of 1x you are getting 1.1x out of employees that leverage AI in some fashion. yeah it's not much but over time and enough staff that adds up and as people become more familiar with how to prompt and use ai it will become that much more of a productive and valuable tool.

jaredcwhite7mo ago

Slop does not improve anything. Many people have a visceral negative reaction to it. Every blog post I see with some crappy AI image attached, the content is drastically devalued for me. Some workflows are actually slower now. People become deskilled. Some start to fall into delusion.

This technology is not an industry win.

NoPicklez7mo ago

There's a lot of organisations in which AI using being used well either.

washadjeffmad7mo ago

IT is generally a force multiplier, not a revenue generator.

brokensegue7mo ago

I've seen some pretty bad AI related proposals.

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