Here’s a finding that should be carved into marble at every Fortune 500 headquarters: Large enterprises, despite having more resources, more talent, and bigger budgets, are failing at AI implementation at twice the rate of mid-market companies.
The numbers are staggering. Enterprises take nine months or longer to move from pilot to production. Mid-market companies? Ninety days. That’s not a minor efficiency gap—that’s a fundamental breakdown in organizational capability.
Large enterprises lead in pilot volume but have the lowest pilot-to-scale conversion rates. They’re essentially running innovation theater—lots of activity, lots of PowerPoints, lots of “AI Centers of Excellence,” but almost no actual value creation. Meanwhile, mid-market companies with a fraction of the resources are quietly revolutionizing their operations.
Why? Because enterprise AI initiatives are where good ideas go to die. They get stuck in committees, strangled by governance, and diluted by stakeholders who each want the AI to do something different. By the time something gets approved, the market has moved on, the team has quit, and the budget has been reallocated to yet another pilot that will never see the light of day.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
