Is AI Helping or Wasting Time and Money?

Let's talk about the elephant in every boardroom right now.

AI investment is at record levels. Total corporate AI spending hit $252 billion in 2024. Enterprise AI budgets are projected to increase by 64% in 2025. Every organisation is either implementing AI, planning to implement AI, or feeling guilty about not implementing AI fast enough.

And yet.

70-85% of AI initiatives fail to meet their expected outcomes. 42% of companies abandoned most of their AI projects in 2025- up from just 17% the year before. Enterprises lost over $104 million in 2024 due to underutilised technology alone.

How is it possible to spend this much money and still get such poor results?

I've been delivering change and transformation programmes for over ten years across the: NHS, financial services, automotive, and the public sector. And I can tell you exactly why this is happening. It has almost nothing to do with the technology.

The problem isn't the AI. It's the change.

Here's the stat that should be on every executive's desk: 79% of leaders are confident their organisation will meet its AI transformation goals. Only 28% of employees feel adequately trained to use AI. And just 25% say they can actually use it efficiently.

That gap between what the boardroom believes and what the frontline experiences, is where transformation goes to die. I've seen it with ERP implementations, with Agile transformations, with digital change programmes of every kind. AI is just the latest and most expensive version of the same story.

Technology does not change organisations. People do.

What's actually going wrong:

1. Organisations are buying AI before they understand the problem they're solving. 

AI gets commissioned at the top, handed down to teams, and then everyone wonders why adoption is low. If the people using the tool don't understand why it exists or how it makes their job better- they won't use it. Simple as that.

2. Nobody is managing the human side of the change. 

Employees waste an average of 36 working days a year due to technology frustrations. That's seven working weeks. Not because the technology is bad, but because the rollout, the training, the communication, and the support were all inadequate.

3. There's no change infrastructure. 

Organisations that implement even a single digital adoption best practice can nearly triple their transformation ROI- from 22% to 64%. Triple. That's not a marginal improvement. That's the difference between an AI programme that delivers and one that becomes a very expensive lesson.

What good looks like:

The organisations getting real value from AI right now are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated tools. They're the ones that treated AI adoption as a change programme, not an IT project.

They assessed readiness before they rolled out. They communicated the why, not just the what. They trained people properly (not a one-hour webinar and a PDF). They built feedback loops so frontline experience shaped the rollout. They had someone accountable for adoption, not just implementation.

Sound familiar? It should. It's change management. It's been the answer to failed technology implementations for thirty years. It's still the answer now.

The uncomfortable truth:

AI is not going to save your organisation money if you don't invest in helping your people actually use it. And the change management capability to do that well is exactly what most organisations have been cutting since 2023.

The irony is painful.

Sources: WalkMe State of Digital Adoption 2025 report; industry AI adoption research, 2025