A year ago, 17% of companies said they’d abandoned most of their AI initiatives. In S&P Global Market Intelligence’s latest survey, it was 42%. That’s more than doubled in a single year. The average company also scrapped 46% of its proofs of concept before they reached production.
The three top obstacles weren’t “the AI wasn’t smart enough.” They were cost, data privacy risk and security risk. Those are business problems, not model problems, and no better model fixes them.
That tells you where initiatives actually die. They don’t die in the demo. They die in the gap between “this is impressive” and “this is approved, affordable, safe and wired into how we really work.” Most pilots are built to impress. Very few are built to survive that gap.
If nearly half of proofs of concept never make it, the useful question isn’t “which AI tool should we try?” It’s “what would this pilot need to prove to survive cost, privacy and security review?” Answer that before you start, and you stop collecting demos and start building things that ship.
So what — if your current pilot succeeded technically, would it clear cost, privacy and security review? Now what — write down the three questions your approvers will ask, and build the pilot to answer them.
Source: S&P Global Market Intelligence survey of 1,000+ respondents in North America and Europe (March 2025, via CIO Dive)
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