Making A Useful AI Pilot: Business Tips And More

For any kind of business, survival is tough. You have the commonly cited statistic, in America, that 75% of new businesses fail within five years. But then, new numbers came along.

It turns out that to the extent we can measure AI implementation, a full 95% of pilots fail to provide the ROI and results desired. So that’s one fifth of the 25% of traditional businesses that can keep the doors open. Just for context – that’s not related. But it does show you how hard it is for business leaders to address AI goals.

At this year’s The Next Endeavor event, in Mountain View, CA, I saw a panel discuss the realities around beating those odds. What’s the special sauce for companies that actually get a working pilot off the ground, and go on to develop it some more? (Disclaimer: With Imagination in Action, I help to put on these events.)

It was a great lineup: we had Paul Baier, co-founder of GAI Insights, and Andrew Lau, co-founder of Jellyfish. We had Pankaj Thakkar, CEO and co-founder of Kloudfuse, and Rahul Todkar, founder and CEO of Nasik, as well, to talk about agentic business, the challenge for humans, and much more.

Around the Table

There wasn’t an actual table, per se, but there were introductions.

Lau explained what Jellyfish does:

“Very few companies are able to get the full yield of the productivity that they actually aspire to,” he said. “And so we help companies through the transformation, through observability, telemetry, and transformation.”

He also gave this thesis statement:

“The main message is actually, I think AI now outpaces the challenges of human transformation,” he said. “Most companies aren’t seeing this yield, because it’s hard to get your teams, your roles, your people, and your processes to change. That’s actually the harder lift that’s moving through here.”

Here’s his main message:

“We do a fair amount of presentations and discussions at the board level,” Baier added of GAI Insights, “with executives, and this stuff is so confusing and moving so fast.”