AIster · The agentic age · Culture
An MIT report says 95% of AI pilots show no profit impact
One statistic about business AI fed a week of talk about an AI bubble
Key facts
- Date
- 18 Aug 2025
- Era
- The agentic age
- Interest
- Culture
- Threads
- Labs & people
- Report
- “The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025”, MIT NANDA
- Basis
- 150 interviews with leaders, 350 employees surveyed, 300 public deployments
- Buy vs build
- Bought-in tools succeeded about 67% of the time; internal builds one-third as often
- Caveat
- Fortune noted NANDA builds AI protocols, a possible bias, though it saw no sign of skewed results
MIT’s NANDA initiative reported that about 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots, trial projects inside companies, delivered no measurable profit impact. It blamed a “learning gap” in how organisations used the tools, more than the models themselves. Fortune’s 18 August story spread widely, and AI-linked shares including NVIDIA, CoreWeave, Microsoft and Alphabet fell that week.