Why AI Saves Time but Doesn't Make Money

95% of AI pilots show zero financial return.

Author

Keval Vachharajani
February 25, 2026

Happy Wednesday,

Right now, companies are spending billions on AI subscriptions. Employees are using them to summarize meetings, write code, and draft emails.

People feel faster. But when the CFO looks at the quarterly earnings, the numbers haven’t moved.

According to the MIT-led State of AI in Business 2025 Report, a staggering 95% of organizations are realizing zero measurable financial return from their Generative AI investments.

Why is there such a massive gap between how useful AI feels and how much money it actually makes?

The "Horizontal AI" Trap

Most companies are buying what the industry calls "Horizontal AI." These are general-purpose tools (like enterprise chatbots or Copilots) designed to do a little bit of everything for every department.

Here is the problem with horizontal tools: The ROI is impossible to capture.

If you give 1,000 employees an AI tool that saves them 10 minutes a day on administrative work, you technically saved thousands of hours. But you cannot put those hours on a balance sheet. You didn't reduce headcount, and you didn't increase sales. The financial benefit is spread too thin across the company to measure.

Because the value is so blurry, a recent Gartner analysis projected that 30% of GenAI projects are most likely to get abandoned after proof-of-concept (PoC) due to poor data, risks, costs, or unclear value.

The Fix: Shift to "Vertical AI"

The 5% of enterprises actually seeing a financial return are doing the exact opposite. They are abandoning the "AI for everyone" strategy and adopting "Vertical AI."

Vertical AI does not try to be a general assistant. It is a highly specialized tool trained on industry-specific data to solve one precise, expensive business bottleneck.

  • The Horizontal Trap: Buying a general AI chatbot to "make the sales team more productive." (The financial impact is invisible).

  • The Vertical Fix: Deploying an AI tool trained specifically on your company's past contracts to automatically flag compliance risks in new vendor agreements. (The impact is immediately measurable in legal hours saved).

The Takeaway:

If your AI strategy is focused on making every employee 2% faster, you will likely never see the ROI.

To cross the ROI divide, stop spreading general AI across the entire company. Find your single most expensive operational bottleneck, and apply a specialized AI tool to make that one process 80% cheaper.

That’s today’s Wednesday Deep Dive & Analysis.

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How to Train AI to Write Like You

Cheers,

Keval, Editor

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