A recent MIT report (The State of AI in Business 2025) put it starkly: 95% of organisations fail to generate real value from GenAI. Most never get past pilots and proofs of concept.
But there’s a 5% that do succeed and not just with experiments, but with profitable, scaled outcomes.
So, what’s different about them? And more importantly, what could the rest of us learn?
The ProductBreaks team, working together with clients across many different industries have seen the patterns first-hand. The 5% aren’t doing magic. They’re behaving differently. They adopt certain mindsets that allow them to turn technology into results. And those behaviours are repeatable.
They bridge the gap between process and AI
This is the first and most critical behaviour.
Process owners often don’t know what AI can and cannot do. AI experts rarely understand the messy variation of real-world processes. The result? Misaligned expectations, missed opportunities, and frustration.
Think of it like trying to scale car production. For a one-off, you might hammer aluminium into shape. For a few hundred, you might use fibreglass moulds. For millions, you need pressed steel. But too many teams, when asked to scale, simply hire more people with hammers. Not because they’re foolish, but because they don’t know what else is possible.
The 5% do something different: they put process experts and AI experts in the same room. They encourage honesty about what’s feasible and what isn’t. And they work together to close the gaps.
That collaboration is where scaling starts.
They think in products, not projects
The second behaviour is product thinking.
The 5% begin with the customer problem, the pain point, the unmet need. Because if you’re not solving for customer needs, you’re not relevant.
But they don’t stop there. They look at strategy: does this solution align with where the organisation is going? Does it position us to compete on trust, service, price, or something else that really matters?
And then they ask: Can we do this? Not in a vague way, but with a clear-eyed view of what AI can deliver today, where their own capabilities stand, and where they need to test and learn.
Product thinking is about holding those three truths together: customer; strategy; feasibility and finding the sweet spot in between.
The 5% apply this discipline to AI. They don’t let GenAI become just some R&D. They make it a product.
They build a culture that learns and scales
This is less visible, but it’s decisive. Culture is where you see the real differences between the 95 and the 5.
In the 5%:
Failure is data, not a career risk. They place small bets, learn quickly, and scale the ones that work.
Governance is an enabler, not a blocker. Bias, security, compliance, thought through from the start, so teams move faster.
Data foundations are ready. Clean, integrated, governed. Without it, AI goes nowhere.
Tacit knowledge becomes explicit. One client’s staff could always recommend the perfect product in person, but their website consistently got it wrong. We fixed that by capturing what staff knew and turning it into data AI could use.
Change isn’t bolted on. Solutions are embedded into workflows, so people trust and adopt them.
These are cultural muscles. And the 5% keep them fit.
They focus on outcomes, not outputs
Finally, the 5% are obsessed with outcomes.
It’s tempting to measure what’s easy: more clicks, more emails, more activity. But activity is not value.
The 5% look for impact:
Time saved
Costs avoided
Revenue generated
Customer experience uplifted
For one client in entertainment, the real measure wasn’t clicks. It was TVs sold as a leading outcome, and viewing time uplifted as a trailing one.
From the very first thin slice, the 5% measure ROI. They don’t wait for a mythical big bang.
The behaviours that matter
If there’s a thread running through all of this, it’s that the 5% behave differently. They:
Bridge the process ↔ AI gap with cross-functional honesty.
Apply product thinking to balance customer, strategy, and feasibility.
Build cultural muscles that make learning and scaling natural.
Stay focused on outcomes, not outputs.
These aren’t checklists. They’re ways of leading. Ways of thinking. Ways of showing up as an organisation.
The behaviours of the 5% aren’t complicated but they are deliberate. They build trust between experts, discipline into decisions, and resilience into culture. Above all, they measure what matters.
The organisations in the 5% don’t have all the answers. What they do have is a way of showing up: curious, pragmatic, and prepared to change. That is what keeps them ahead.
The real question isn’t can you use GenAI. It’s whether you’re willing, as a leader, to adopt the behaviours that turn potential into profit.
The ProductBreaks team are helping organisations across sectors do exactly that, delivering outcomes, not outputs, and making GenAI profitable in practice.
 | A guest post by
|
True for so initiatives, not just AI products.