🧩 Crossing the GenAI Divide: Why 95% of Companies Fail with AI (and How to Join the 5%)

👋 Hey friends,

Happy Monday! I’ll be honest — I’ve been obsessing over this idea of the GenAI Divide lately. Not just the hype we see on LinkedIn about how AI is “changing everything,” but the real, messy, behind-the-scenes question: is it actually driving results?

MIT NANDA just published a massive study on enterprise AI adoption, and the headline is brutal. 95% of companies are seeing zero ROI from GenAI. Billions spent. Thousands of pilots. Endless press releases. And most businesses are still stuck in “demo land.”

In my opinion, that stat should be a wake-up call. But here’s the twist: the 5% who do get it right aren’t just experimenting — they’re crossing what the report calls the GenAI Divide, the gap between experimentation and transformation.

So today, I want to unpack this divide. Why are so many teams falling short? Why are a handful pulling ahead? And what does it really take — practically, not theoretically — to move from hype to hard ROI?

Let’s explore.

• The GenAI Divide: High Adoption, Low Transformation

• By the Numbers (and They’re Stark)

• Success vs. Failure: What the Divide Looks Like in Practice

• The Shadow AI Economy

• Why Pilots Stall

• Where the Money Actually Goes

• Builders Who Cross the Divide

• Buyers Who Cross the Divide

• The Workforce Impact (So Far)

• Beyond Agents → The Agentic Web