Rob Wiblin

It's widely understood that enterprise tech deployments often take years to show bottom line impacts, even if they're going quite well.

And notice that by this standard, an AI project that merely breaks even, that's a failure.

A project that has benefited the company in some way that hasn't yet markedly affected productivity or profits?

Failure.

And a project that's on track to be profitable next year but isn't yet?

Equally, a failure.

Do you get the sense that maybe these authors would prefer to find that these projects aren't working?

Well, we'll come back to that.

But another key thing to keep in mind is that these projects were running on 2024 AI models, the ones that couldn't figure out that a marble in a cup would fall out if you turned the cup upside down.

AI was just hot garbage back then compared to what we have access to today.

that a quarter of projects could easily turn a profit with models like that is actually kind of remarkable, if it is true.

But we haven't even gotten to the weirdest thing about how the study's results were described, because all the numbers we've been talking about so far refer exclusively to custom, task-specific AIs that companies develop or procure for some specific narrow use case.

that's not the most common or indeed the best way to use artificial intelligence.

Most of us just use ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini to get our work done faster or do it to a higher level of quality.

And indeed, the report found that staff at over 90% of companies surveyed regularly use generative AI for their work tasks, in many cases, multiple times a day.

So the headline result should actually be that a quarter of custom applications of AI rapidly turn a profit and that almost all workers at the company surveyed are using personal AI tools somewhere between regularly and constantly.

For some reason, the report is decidedly unimpressed by these uses of AI and makes the comment that these tools primarily enhance individual productivity, not profit and loss performance.

I may not be a tenured professor of business, but if your staff are each individually more productive, doesn't that mean that you can sell more products while hiring less staff, at least if you're managing your organization at all competently?

Wouldn't that provide some sort of opportunity to improve your profitability?

I mean, giving a delivery driver a faster van only enhances individual delivery speed, but does that mean that faster deliveries wouldn't impact a company's bottom line?