In other words, the AI ROI crisis of 2025 was never really about the AI. Most enterprise AI projects didn’t fail. If you’re a CIO defending a budget line, that distinction is cold comfort, because “we can’t tell if it worked” and “it didn’t work” produce the same conversation with your CFO. You don’t fix an unprovable project with a better model. The conventional read is that these are the safe choices, the training-wheels projects companies run while they work up the nerve for customer-facing AI.