Evan J Schwartz

The race to adopt artificial intelligence has triggered a paradox: unprecedented technological promise alongside unprecedented organizational failure. According to MIT's 2025 State of AI in Business report, analyzing 300+ initiatives, 95% of generative AI pilots fail to deliver measurable impact on the P&L . Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, only about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration. I approach this challenge from multiple vantage points. I serve...

A chip truck sat idling at the scalehouse. Six months of requirements gathering. Hundreds of sign-off sheets. User acceptance testing. Conference room piloting. Everything checked and double-checked. Go-live day arrived at the pulp mill. The scaler looked at me and asked a simple question: "Sir, how do you sell chips out of this system?" I was confident. Probably arrogant. "This is a pulp mill. We make paper here. We don't sell chips here." He stared back. "Well, Mr. Wizard, I've got a chip...

I took down an entire business during a management meeting. It was early in my career, back when SQL Query Analyzer was the primary tool for database work. I was running mitigation scripts daily, keeping a legacy system alive while we bought time for a rewrite. One day, management called me into an urgent meeting. The system might have lost the company money, and they needed me to find it. I got up from my desk like a boss and walked into that conference room. Ten minutes in, shadows started...