This deck dissects 47 real-world AI projects and finds that 73% never reach production, usually because teams start with “we need AI” instead of a concrete business problem, discover ugly data realities too late, or get stuck in endless POCs without sponsorship or the right talent mix. It walks through three detailed “autopsies” (a $4.2M unused chatbot, a forecasting model that lost $8M, and an AI-first startup nearly wiped out by foundation models) to show how technically successful models can still destroy value. The back half gives operators a playbook—premortems, health dashboards, and hard kill criteria—to fail fast, salvage struggling initiatives, and only scale what actually moves business KPIs.
