It’s not failure, it’s an investment in the future
“Sixty-two per cent of companies reported that [redacted] is important to their business, with the average organisation burning through €770,000 on [redacted] projects that delivered nothing.”
I’m betting that everyone reading the above can guess what ‘redacted’ refers to. Now, I don’t know about you but I can’t help feeling that ought to be a bad thing. How can something be important to your business but deliver nothing? Surely, failure to deliver anything is the very definition of uselessness.
And it can’t be healthy if 99% of respondents to the same survey revealed they had experienced [redacted] project failure and a clear majority (57%) admitted to spending more on failed [redacted] projects than successful ones.
Apart from that, everything’s great.
Oh wait, there’s also this: 53% of IT decision-makers admitted their [redacted] made decisions they couldn’t explain to customers, 54% were unable to explain their [redacted’s] decision-making to regulators and 53% had discovered [redacted] making biased or discriminatory decisions in the past 12 months.
That might seem a little concerning but, if you look on the bright side, it shows that almost half are able to explain [redacted] decisions to customers and regulators. So there’s that.
All of these findings come from a survey of 200 IT decision-makers in large organisations in Ireland carried out by Censuswide on behalf of Saros Consulting. Commenting on the results, Ray Armstrong, co-founder and co-CEO of Saros Consulting, said they showed that AI (yes, it was AI all along) ambitions “are coming at an unnecessary cost to enterprises in Ireland. We are seeing a pattern of businesses investing significant resources in AI, without fully understanding why, and in the hope of success that often doesn’t come to fruition.”
We have probably now arrived at the point where the “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this?” meme can be deployed.
Whose fault is it if someone is investing resources in something without fully understanding why? Clearly, a lot of it rests with the person doing the investing. But some of it is also the responsibility of the person advising them to invest resources in that something (aka AI). If a customer invests in AI in the hope of success that doesn’t come to fruition that seems careless on behalf of the customer but also of the person selling it.
If you’re selling someone something that doesn’t work as promised more than half of the time doesn’t that seem a little bit dubious? Dodgy, even? I mean, if you bought a product that was supposed to revolutionise your life and it didn’t work half the time, you might feel entitled to be aggrieved.
Redefining success
According to Armstrong’s fellow co-founder and co-CEO, Justin van der Spuy, businesses in Ireland need to “reassess how they decide which AI projects to invest in and ensure proper safeguards are in place. Failure to do so will result in wasted spend with no tangible return, or even worse, a negative one”.
It sounds simple but how easy is it to reassess AI projects when the whole IT world seems to have been swept along in an unprecedented tidal wave of hype that is gorging money and resources way beyond any rational perspective? Who can companies trust to do that work? And if they find someone who is honest about what they can and can’t do with their AI projects, might they conclude that the solution is so underwhelming at present as to make it less of a priority?
Armstrong warns that the “many promises of AI are undoubtedly exciting”, but they will remain out of reach to organisations who do not define a strategy first. This may well be true but what many businesses are discovering is that their understanding of what a “promise” constitutes may not be quite the same as that of the people purveying AI. Is it any wonder they don’t fully understand why they are investing resources in AI projects?
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