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The 30% Report

70% of AI pilots never reach production. Get the playbook for the 30% that do.

The mistakes that kill AI pilots happen before any AI is built. This report covers those mistakes and the decisions that prevent them.

30 minutes. No prep needed. We figure out fit together.

According to Deloitte, 3 in 4 organisations are already running AI pilots. Only 39% see consistent ROI. The gap is everything before the technology: which process was chosen, whether the outcome was ever defined, whether anyone owns adoption when the pilot actually works.

Most pilots fail before any AI is written. The decision that kills them is made in the first conversation. Once the work starts, there's no clean recovery. You either push a failing pilot to its logical end or restart from scratch. Neither is cheap.

This report is about making the first conversation the right one.

→ Industry benchmark (Deloitte 2026, BCG 2025). Not AI Fluent client results.

Who this is for

  • Operations and plant managers planning or evaluating an AI initiative for the first time
  • SMB founders and owner-operators considering automation for a specific back-office workflow
  • Team leads and project owners who need to make the case internally for a scoped pilot
  • Anyone who's watched an AI project die in pilot and wants to understand what went wrong

Not a buyer's guide. A working document.

Written by Florin Cusmereanu, founder of AI Fluent. He spent 12 years running Tier-1 automotive operations across Europe before building the AI systems that now do that work faster. The patterns in this report come from operational reality.

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What's inside

  • Why pilots stall. The 5 failure patterns that appear before a single line of AI is written, including the one that shows up in nearly every case.
  • Back-office first. Why operational back-office processes consistently outperform production or customer-facing pilots as starting points, and how to use that to your advantage.
  • The people factor. BCG traces 70% of AI implementation outcomes to people and workflow, not technology (BCG 2025, industry benchmark). This chapter explains what that means for the first 90 days.
  • Minimum viable governance. 3 decisions every pilot needs before kickoff: data access, usage policy, and who owns adoption if it works.
  • How to measure it honestly. A 3-metric framework that separates real progress from the numbers that just look good.
  • The sequencing map. A decision guide for choosing which process to automate first, based on operational impact and implementation risk.

Report PDF body is a separate deliverable — design phase. The 6 chapters above define scope and structure.