A new KPMG study has revealed that just seven percent of senior leaders report having established a return on investment from artificial intelligence, raising serious questions about how businesses are approaching AI adoption.
To discuss the findings, UC Today's Christopher Carey spoke to Adam Hadley, Founder of AI consultancy QuantSpark, to explore why so many organisations are struggling to turn AI ambition into measurable results.
Magical Thinking Is Holding Businesses Back
According to Hadley, the root cause of failure often has little to do with AI itself. "A lot of that confidence is based on what I call magical thinking," he explained, "that AI will just solve the intractable problems or challenges that a business might have."
He pointed to Gartner's hype cycle as a useful framework, noting that many businesses swing from extreme optimism to outright negativity when AI projects fail to deliver, often because they were not framed correctly from the outset.
Compounding the challenge is the rapid pace of AI development. Solutions that cost significant investment to build just a year ago can now potentially be replicated in a fraction of the time using the latest models, making it difficult for organisations to keep up.
