"95% of AI pilots fail? Perfect. Stop running pilots. Start compounding intelligence."
Fortune amplifies the headline. LinkedIn reshares it. Executives cite it in board meetings. Everyone quotes 95% failure. Nobody reads page 14 of the original report, I did.
Page 14 says 90% of your employees already succeed with AI. Just not your AI.
Your employees spend $200 on Claude Code Max. Fix 50 bugs monthly. Your enterprise spends $500k on pilots. Fixes 10.
The math is obvious. The conclusion isn't.
"Your best developers pay 10x more for AI than average workers. They're not paying for features. They're paying for depth."
Here's what's hidden: Your best developers pay 10x more for AI than average workers. $200 for Claude Code Max versus $20 for ChatGPT. They're not paying for features. They're paying for depth.
The 10x engineer became the 10x investor. In their own leverage.
Shadow IT won. Official IT lost.
Why? They measured the wrong thing.
"Pilots measure adoption. Markets measure decisions."
Pilots measure adoption. Markets measure decisions.
Your CFO tracks bugs versus features. Opex versus capex. AI turns bugs into capacity. Maintenance into momentum.
847 dependabot alerts become 23. That's not ROI. That's time recovered.
Engineering managers now face a paradox. AI doubles their capacity. Leadership expects half the timeline. But here's what nobody says: bugs make you better.
Every bug fixed is a pattern recognized. Every test written is future capacity created.
The teams crushing estimates aren't moving faster. They're failing less.
"CFOs demanding impossible timelines are doing you a favor. Pressure creates clarity. Constraints create innovation."
CFOs demanding impossible timelines are doing you a favor. Pressure creates clarity. Constraints create innovation.
The best teams thank their CFO's skepticism. It made them prove value in bugs fixed, not slides presented.
Partners succeed 67% of the time. Internal builds succeed 33%. That's a strategy, not a statistic.
The successful 5% never ran pilots. They built memory that compounds.
Every conversation teaches the next one. Every bug prevented saves the next sprint.
"My tools don't have success criteria. They have compound effects."
My tools don't have success criteria. They have compound effects.
claude-self-reflect: 10,000 conversations, searchable. cc-enhance: 4 steps for typos, 18 for production.
Stop asking what AI costs. Ask what ignorance costs.
Every unfixed bug compounds into features not shipped. Every slow decision compounds into markets not entered.
The report says 95% fail. The truth: 95% measure wrong.
Bugs per dollar. Decisions per day. Memory per conversation.
"Compound intelligence or compound ignorance. Choose."
Compound intelligence or compound ignorance.
Choose.
95% of pilots fail? Perfect. Stop running pilots. Start compounding intelligence.
Resources:
- Read the report: https://lnkd.in/gyskKj7e
- Build compound systems:
- https://lnkd.in/gqF6EPKA
- https://lnkd.in/gfwRyH9F
- https://lnkd.in/gqg4Csw2
- https://lnkd.in/gNP_rcR4
The tools exist. The choice is yours.