When a twenty-year veteran retires, the org chart barely changes. What changes is everything that person carried in their head: the workaround for a finicky customer, the reason a process exists, the judgment that turned a messy situation into a routine one. That quiet exit is institutional knowledge loss, and for mid-market companies it is […]
Every finance leader has heard that AI will transform the back office. Far fewer have seen it actually shorten a close, sharpen a forecast, or free up a team that is buried in reconciliations. That gap between promise and payoff is exactly where most mid-market CFOs are stuck right now, and it is the reason […]
Did you know most AI pilots never make it into daily operations? Here’s how it goes. Your team ran the pilot. The demo looked impressive, the early results were promising, and then the momentum quietly disappeared. If that sounds familiar, you are in the majority. A widely cited MIT study reported that roughly 95% of […]
Last year we published a plain-language guide to AI tokens and credits to help leaders make sense of how AI usage is priced. The core ideas still hold: tokens measure usage, and credits measure cost. What has changed in the past twelve months is the math around both. Prices per token have dropped sharply, yet […]
The last few weeks moved the AI market on almost every front at once. A record-setting model launched and then got pulled by the government. Open-weight models quietly caught up to the biggest names. Price wars intensified, AI search kept eating traditional search, and regulators sharpened the tools they will use on enterprises. Here is […]
Most AI investment decisions are made backward. A team picks a tool, runs a pilot, then tries to back into the business case after the spending has started. The numbers usually look fine in the deck and worse on the controller’s screen. McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI survey found only 39 percent of organizations attribute […]
Almost every leadership team is having the same AI conversation right now. Everyone agrees something needs to happen. Nobody agrees on what, and the planning meetings keep ending with “let’s circle back next quarter.” A few weeks later, one team experiments on its own, the results never reach the rest of the business, and the […]
Most AI projects do not fail because the technology was wrong. They fail because the partner was. Roughly 80 percent of AI projects miss their intended business value, and the average sunk cost on an abandoned AI initiative now sits around $7.2 million. The pattern across the post-mortems is consistent: the model worked in the […]
Most AI projects do not earn their budget. RAND’s 2025 analysis found that roughly 80 percent of AI projects fail to deliver their intended business value, and MIT Sloan reports that around 95 percent of generative AI pilots never scale to production. Those numbers sound scary until you see where the failures cluster. They almost […]