5% Success

🔭 Signal: 5% Success

You've likely seen the headline: MIT's State of AI in Business 2025 reports that 95% of organizations are getting zero return from GenAI.

For those of us in the organizational transformation space, it's déjà vu. Back in 2018, Tony Saldana's Why Digital Transformations Fail found nearly identical odds: "90% of success is determined by change management or culture… only 10% by the technology."

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🧠 Strategic (Human) Prompt: Alignment Under Pressure

So why do we keep running (and failing) the same experiment? Here are some questions to reveal your organization's own unique answer:

What structures in your organization actually facilitate re-alignment when the heat rises?

or..

What warning signals are currently too easy for your team to ignore?

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➖ Subtraction: Prune Pilots Pronto

It's an especially good time to demonstrate your own value by proactively cutting AI pilots, test cases, POCs, and experiments. Assume only 1 in 10 pilots will deliver direct results the business values. Treat the rest as compost, but not garbage.

Don't just prune. Document learnings in one page before cutting. How can you redirect resources so that the remaining bud you're betting on not only grows faster but blooms into stronger returns?

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🍞 Analogy: Yeast vs. Bread

AI Transformation is like baking bread. AI is the yeast. Business pressure is the heat. Neither makes bread on its own. Too much or too little of either, and what comes out of the oven isn't edible. That memorable aroma and taste of fresh-baked bread? It's mostly all the other things that we enjoy.

The baker's job is to focus on the bread itself, not the yeast packet, not the oven dial, not the beautiful recipe book.

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♬ Closing Notes

The 5% who succeed don't treat technology as transformation. They treat it like a leavening agent that helps our business culture rise.

Most of the others are still mistaking yeast for bread.

How about you? Is your organization making bread, or just stockpiling yeast?

👉 If you want to join the 5%, grab a slot here.

Until next week,

Sam Rogers

AI Master Chef

Snap Synapse – tools and thinking partners to fuel your AI transformation