Companies Waste AI Investments by Measuring Wrong Metrics, Missing Real Business Impact

Companies waste AI investments by creating new metrics to measure success instead of using existing business goals, often achieving impressive local productivity gains while failing to deliver real organizational value or mission-level impact.

• Organizations make the critical error of creating new metrics to measure AI impact instead of using existing goals and proven measurement systems to evaluate whether AI helps achieve their fundamental mission
• AI often creates local optimization traps where teams see impressive productivity gains in specific areas (like 25% faster feature delivery) while overall organizational value delivery remains unchanged
• Effective AI implementation requires research-driven approaches with clear hypotheses about how AI will impact mission-level metrics, rather than implementing first and scrambling to find metrics that show improvement afterward