By Max Nirenberg, Global CRO and Managing Director of Commit USA
Op Ed
Let me be honest with you. I have sat across the table from hundreds of business leaders over the past few years, and almost every conversation starts the same way. There is excitement in the room, big ideas floating around, and a genuine belief that AI is going to change everything. And you know what? They are not wrong. But somewhere between that first energized meeting and actually building something real, most companies just… stop. That gap between wanting to do something and actually doing it is what keeps me up at night.
Table of Contents
- The Implementation Gap
- The AI Market’s Untapped Potential
- A Call for Strategic Focus
- The ROI Oversight
- A Dual-Perspective Approach
- The Commit Advantage
- Shifting from Curiosity to Execution
- Measurable Success Through a Product-Centric Lens
- The Inevitable AI Transition
- A Call to Action
The Implementation Gap
Here is a number that stopped me cold when we first calculated it. Out of more than 200 AI initiatives we have been part of at Commit — as an AWS Premier Tier Partner with a dedicated AI competency — only 10% of companies that ran a proof-of-concept actually went on to use the technology in their daily work. Ten percent. Think about that. Nine out of ten teams put in the time, spent the money, got their people excited, and then walked away with nothing to show for it. That is not a technology problem. That is a people and priorities problem.
The AI Market’s Untapped Potential
And here is what makes that even harder to swallow. The global AI market is on track to hit $1.59 trillion by 2028, growing at over 20% a year. The opportunity is enormous and it is not slowing down. Yet around 65% of businesses will tell you, if you ask them honestly, that they are still figuring out where to even begin. The interest is there. The investment is there. What is missing is the bridge between the two.
A Call for Strategic Focus
Even the most prominent voices in tech have wrestled with this tension. Sundar Pichai has called AI more transformative than electricity or fire, which is a bold thing to say. But in the same breath, he has reminded us that none of that potential matters without a thoughtful, responsible approach to actually using it. Ambition without strategy is just noise.
The ROI Oversight
So what is really going wrong? In my experience, it almost always comes back to the same thing: nobody asked the hard question early enough. That question is simple — what is this actually going to do for our business? It sounds obvious, but you would be surprised how many teams dive straight into building something technically impressive without ever tying it back to real outcomes. AI becomes a passion project rather than a business decision, and passion projects rarely survive the next budget cycle.
A Dual-Perspective Approach
The companies that get this right are the ones that refuse to separate the business conversation from the technical one. They treat AI the same way a smart founder treats a new product — by asking who it is for, what problem it solves, and whether anyone will actually pay for it before they spend a dollar building it. Identifying the right use cases, understanding the potential return, and aligning stakeholders around a shared definition of success — that is the work that has to happen first. Everything else comes after.
The Commit Advantage
This is honestly just how we think at Commit, and it goes back to where we started. When we were founded in 2005, our entire job was helping early-stage startups survive long enough to find their footing. You learn pretty quickly in that environment that good technology means nothing if it does not solve a real problem for a real person. That mindset has never left us. Today, with nearly 800 people across our teams, we still approach every client engagement the same way — by trying to understand the business before we ever talk about the solution.
Shifting from Curiosity to Execution
Something has clearly shifted in the past year. Twelve months ago, people were asking us what AI was and whether they should care. Now they are sitting down with us and saying, “We know we need to do this — help us figure out how.” That is a meaningful change. Our response is to slow down before we speed up. We spend real time inside a client’s world — their workflows, their data, their users, their constraints — before we ever point at a solution. The goal is not to find a use case that sounds impressive. It is to find the one that will genuinely move the needle.
Measurable Success Through a Product-Centric Lens
And that patience is paying off. Since we shifted to leading with product thinking rather than technical capability, 86% of the clients we work with on Generative AI are making it all the way to production. That is not an accident. It is what happens when you build toward a real outcome instead of a demo. Our partnership with AWS has helped too, giving our clients access to funding programs that take some of the financial pressure off and make it easier to commit to the full journey.
The Inevitable AI Transition
Satya Nadella said something that has stuck with me: every company is becoming a software company, and AI is going to be at the heart of that change. He is right. This is not something that is coming eventually — it is happening now, in real businesses, in real industries. The question is no longer whether AI will reshape how companies operate. The question is whether your company will shape that change or be shaped by it.
A Call to Action
I will leave you with this. The technology is not the hard part anymore. The hard part is deciding that you are actually going to do something with it — not just explore it, not just run another pilot, but commit to it with real intention and a clear sense of what success looks like. The businesses that figure that out, the ones that stop asking what AI can do and start asking what they want to achieve, those are the ones that are going to look back on this moment as a turning point. I hope yours is one of them.
