If your bar for “transformational” is enterprise-wide reinvention, of course most initiatives fall short in year one. But if your bar is “did this remove a real bottleneck” — a changeover that used to eat two hours, a forecast that used to be a guess — a lot of that 57% is quietly winning and just not counting it.
I’ve been building AI tools into operations since before most people were talking about it, and the pattern holds every time: the initiatives that stick aren’t the ones chasing “transformational.” They’re the ones that solved one real problem for one real team, got measured, and got copied.
That’s not a smaller ambition. It’s the only one that compounds.
So What? Now What?
Not “is AI transformational,” but: what’s the one bottleneck on your floor right now that a narrow, well-scoped AI tool could actually remove? Have you measured whether last quarter’s small win was actually the win, or just the one people talk about?
What’s your team’s real bar for “AI worked”?
The Operations Bridge 
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