Despite mounting skepticism about artificial intelligence in the enterprise, three leaders from Microsoft, Bloomberg Beta, and an AI startup gathered at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit last week with a unified message: High failure rates are not a bug in AI adoption—they’re a feature of learning how transformative technology actually works.
The panel discussion, titled “Working It Out: How AI Is Transforming the Office,” tackled head-on a widely circulated MIT study suggesting that approximately 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail to pay off. The statistic has fueled doubts about whether AI can deliver on its promises, but the three panelists—Amy Coleman, executive vice president and chief people officer at Microsoft; Karin Klein, founding partner at Bloomberg Beta; and Jessica Wu, cofounder and CEO of Sola—pushed back forcefully on the narrative that failure signals fundamental problems with the technology.
