The MIT Media Lab published The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, possibly the most comprehensive study to date on the real use of generative artificial intelligence in organizations.
The central findings include that only 5% of pilots generate rapid impact on revenue or P&L, while the remaining 95% produce no measurable benefits. The main cause is not technological but organizational, termed the learning gap.
ROI does not come from where the most is invested. More than half of budgets go to sales and marketing, but the greatest return appears in back-office automation.
Tools acquired from vendors have a success rate close to 67%, while internal developments reach barely a third. Startups founded by young people achieved more than 20 million dollars in revenue in less than a year.
The gap is cultural, human, and strategic. It is a problem of absorptive capacity: the ability to recognize, assimilate, and apply external knowledge. The MIT describes it as a learning gap.
Organizations must address strategic ambidexterity: efficiently exploiting current units while exploring the new toward disruption.
What the MIT shows is an empirical update of Christensen's innovator's dilemma. Large corporations, trapped in their own incentive systems, fail to capitalize on disruptive technologies.
We need to develop leaders and teams capable of learning with AI, deciding with AI, co-creating with AI. The sustainable advantage is not in access to the technical, but in the strategic and cultural capacity to integrate it.
The great contribution of the report is not pointing out that 95% fail, but showing that success does not depend on AI itself, but on the organizational capacity to integrate it with purpose, coherence, and continuous learning.
