How To Ensure You & Your Leaders Leverage AI Investments To Deliver A Meaningful ROI

Artificial Intelligence spending is booming. Boards are hoping for progress. Investors are starting to ask more pointed questions. Customers are unsure of the value propositions and value added, and whether it’s worth a premium. Vendors are selling miracles that are not easy to manifest. Teams are exhausted, overwhelmed, and confused while worrying about their jobs. Leaders are feeling pressure to act while worrying about their own roles and careers.

Yet despite billions of dollars invested globally, the majority of AI projects yield disappointing real-world results. According to a widely cited MIT analysis, 95% of AI pilots deliver a weak ROI.

I’m not surprised. I’ve been advising Fortune 500s on how to leverage exciting new digital technologies in change, innovation, and business transformation for almost 30 years, and the pattern is repeated:

The internet!
SMS!
3G!
Apps!
IoT!
AR!
3D TVs!
The metaverse!

But without real people valuing the benefits a technology brings, technologies go to the Digital Graveyard.

At SOL, we see this firsthand across global industries. Companies are pouring money into AI tools, computing power, automation technologies, and machine learning infrastructure while failing to innovate and transform the business models and operating models required for AI to succeed. AI, whether predictive, generative, or agentic, is powerful—but the way most leaders think about it is outdated.

The problem is not AI. The problem is a twentieth-century mindset being applied to twenty-first-century technology.

The Real Reason AI Deployments Will Fail

Across every sector we support, from healthcare and financial services to consumer goods and government, we see the same pattern repeating. I see it in event spaces and conference rooms in my work as an AI keynote speaker from New York to Dubai. Leadership teams hope AI will deliver efficiencies, cost savings, and meaningful growth without questioning how their business actually works. This looks like:

• Inserting AI into outdated workflows
• Bolting new AI tools onto unfit IT platforms
• Not challenging the assumptions underlying the operating and business models
• Chasing buzzwords instead of breakthroughs
• Expecting simple, silver bullet fixes
• Avoiding the depth of thinking and insight needed to reinvent operating models and business models
• Skipping the strategic leadership required for successful digital transformation
• Under-estimating the crucial people side of successful business transformation

This is why so many AI pilots fail to deliver. The technology itself is powerful. But leaders try to use advanced AI to run legacy business logic. They want exponential returns without the humility, courage, and creativity required to reimagine the systems they are running. They rely on technical intelligence rather than leadership intelligence.

You cannot shove AI into a twentieth-century business and expect twenty-first-century results. You must redesign the business to take advantage of what AI can uniquely enable.

Lack of AI-Ready Innovation & Transformational Leadership Is Killing ROI

For over twenty-five years, I have watched global corporations race toward new technologies without understanding what they truly make possible. I saw it during Web 1.0, the mobile revolution, the rise of apps, Web 2.0, and again during the blockchain wave. The pattern is identical today with AI.

Executives want transformational results without transforming their minds, cultures, or business. They want breakthrough innovations without actually having any breakthroughs (which don’t come cheap, otherwise everyone would be disrupting their industries all the time). They want customer-centricity without actually sitting with real customers and listening deeply. They want profitable change without changing beliefs or behaviors. They want the outcome of the Hero’s journey without making the journey. They want AI returns without building AI-forward businesses.

In fact, it was after seeing this pattern repeat over and over in the early 2000s, while we advised companies like Microsoft, Diageo, Disney, and Unilever on how to innovate new customer propositions with exponential and emergent technologies, that we built our current transformational, innovation, and now AI-focused leadership development programs. Otherwise, 90% of those innovation programs failed to deliver 10%, let alone 10x or 100x returns. Not because of the process, technologies, or budgets. But because of mindsets, poor leadership, and cultures that block innovation and transformation.

Without the right mindsets, awareness, insight, expertise, and capacity to lead and land tangible innovation and digital transformation, most AI investments will fail. Outdated beliefs, outmoded behaviors, and leadership blind spots are always killers of innovation and genuine digital transformation.

The gap is not technology. The gap is leadership.

Transformational AI-Forward Leadership. The Real Multiplier

AI, whether predictive, generative, or agentic, can deliver sustained value only when leaders develop the capabilities within themselves to lead their teams, business units, and organizations on the lengthy and challenging journeys of genuine AI-powered innovation and digital transformation.

Real ROI on AI investments and deployments can only be unlocked when leaders ask the right questions:

• What pain points matter most to existing customers (and employees) that they are willing to pay a premium to solve?
• What are the most important emerging problems of existing and emerging customers that we can solve for?
• Which of these pain points and problems are we uniquely positioned to solve?
• What could AI enable that is impossible today?
• How do customers want to interact with us in the future?
• How can AI unlock a radically better customer/user experience?
• What assumptions, ways of working, and processes must we challenge, unlearn, or relinquish?
• What parts of our operating and business models do we need to rethink, redesign, or reinvent?
• How do we best safeguard these innovations and digital transformation journeys to maintain the growth of the existing business?
• What kind of culture do we need to build to unleash safe AI experimentation and innovation?
• Given all this, what business are we truly in? What business do we want to be in?
• How could AI unlock these longer-term transformations by reducing costs, improving outcomes, or boosting value added?

This demands more than technical intelligence. It requires creativity, contextual judgment, relational intelligence, embodied presence, and advanced change leadership. These are uniquely human capabilities that all fall under the concept of transformational leadership, cannot be automated, and that determine whether AI becomes a force for transformation or a very expensive frustration.

All of this requires courage, humility, inquiry, and a willingness to rethink everything. It requires leaders who understand systems, not just tools. It requires the transformational leadership capabilities we develop in SOL’s neuroscience-powered AI-ready leadership development journeys and executive training programs.

We’ve known this for a long time. We ran our first AI-focused leadership + innovation program for a major tech unicorn before OpenAI was even founded. Eating our own caviar, our very own generative + agentic AI innovation, which we first broke ground on in 2017, recently entered testing.

Walking the talk as AI innovators and leaders ourselves, we build the human capabilities, intelligence, and wisdom that leaders need to make AI safe, effective, ethical, strategic, and profitable.

To Succeed at AI, Develop & Design Before You Deploy

Companies that achieve 10x or even 100x returns approach AI differently.

• They slow down early so they can accelerate later.
• They do not start with the technology. They start with the people who will use it, pay for it, and sell it.
• They do deep, gnarly, difficult strategic work, starting with identifying first principles in an AI era.
• They engage customers and internal users and understand their needs, fears, and pain points better than anyone else.
• They seek to understand potential use cases of the technologies at the deepest levels.
• They explore new value propositions and experiment to fine-tune them.
• They build cultures capable of creative inquiry, constant experimentation, and systems thinking.
• They rethink the business model. They reinvent the operating model. They transform the people model.
• They shape the system, not only the workflow.
• They embrace the overlooked, messy, and complex human side of innovation and transformation.
• They realize that users of all kinds (except technologists and IT managers) buy benefits stories, not tech specs.
• They understand that technologies like AI exist to deliver value to customers/users, not for their own sake.

They do not treat AI as a plug-and-play tool. They treat it as a catalyst for reinventing how the organization creates value. This is how AI becomes a genuine growth engine rather than another disappointing technology wave.

If you want to unlock real ROI from AI, explore our cutting-edge and high-impact AI-focused leadership development programs and AI-powered innovation programs. Our breakthrough, as a hybrid innovation + leadership consultancy, has been to ensure that our digital and AI leadership programs drive innovation outcomes. And our technology-powered innovation programs build innovation leaders.

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