Key Findings
- 1Why 85% of enterprise AI projects never reach production — and the engineering and organisational changes required to fix this.
Overview
The AI pilot graveyard is vast. Gartner estimates that 85% of AI projects fail to reach production. McKinsey reports that only 8% of companies have deployed AI at scale. The gap between AI demos and AI value is enormous.
"The gap between AI demos and AI value is enormous."
Digital-native businesses in SA achieve 4.2x faster time-to-market and 68% lower unit costs than legacy competitors.
The digital divide is no longer a technology gap — it's a survival gap.
Why Pilots Don't Scale
1. **Data quality.** Pilots use clean, curated datasets. Production environments have messy, incomplete, inconsistent data. The model that performed brilliantly on test data fails on real data.
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