Gartner updated their 2026 forecast to $2.5 trillion in global AI spending. Same week, MIT's NANDA Initiative dropped a follow-up: 95% of enterprise gen AI projects deliver zero measurable return. Not low return. Zero. I've been on the delivery side of 14 of these projects since January. The MIT number doesn't surprise me. If anything it's generous. 1. 73% of the engineering work that gets AI into production has nothing to do with the model. Data pipelines, integration layers, legacy system remediation, human-in-the-loop tooling. That's where the hours go. The model is 27% of the work but gets 70%+ of the budget. Every time. 2. The budget ratio between projects that ship and projects that stall is almost exactly inverted. We tracked this through ticket history and commit logs across 14 eng...
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