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Hype check: does 95 percent of enterprise AI really fail?
The number is real and the headline built on it is not. Here is what the study actually measured.
hype-check
What changed
The claim under check: "about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration; the vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P&L." It comes from MIT's Project NANDA report The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, published 18 August 2025, based on around 150 leader interviews, a survey of roughly 350 employees and 300 publicly disclosed deployments. It is preliminary and not peer reviewed.
Why you should care
The figure is repeated everywhere as 95 percent of AI fails; what it measured was self-reported profit-and-loss impact from a small non-random sample, which is a far narrower claim than the headline it now carries.