Karen T.
Detroit, Michigan
Overview
95% of corporate AI pilots fail to deliver measurable business value. That is the conclusion of MIT researchers who studied 300 public AI deployments, 350 employee surveys, and 150 executive interviews. The cause is not technology. It is organizational. McKinsey found the same pattern in digital transformation: 70% of those initiatives failed because organizations were not prepared to change how their people worked. I watched that pattern up close early in my career, from inside a global enterprise. Not from a consultant's perch. From inside, what I saw was not a technology failure. Digital w
About
95% of corporate AI pilots fail to deliver measurable business value. That is the conclusion of MIT researchers who studied 300 public AI deployments, 350 employee surveys, and 150 executive interviews. The cause is not technology. It is organizational. McKinsey found the same pattern in digital transformation: 70% of those initiatives failed because organizations were not prepared to change how their people worked. I watched that pattern up close early in my career, from inside a global enterprise. Not from a consultant's perch. From inside, what I saw was not a technology failure. Digital was a department, not a way of working. The technology never integrated into how work actually happened. When the hype faded, the investment was largely wasted. When things finally worked, it was not because of better tools. It was because the change reached how people worked. AI is the same story, only much faster. The MIT researchers were blunt: the 95% failure rate is not a technology problem. It is a mirror reflecting organizational unpreparedness. So I work on the human side. Before anything gets implemented, I do the diagnostic work: workflow redesign, role clarity, change management, commercial alignment. I help leadership teams implement AI intentionally: how AI gets used, what guardrails exist, how the org is structured around it, which tools make sense at each stage. I am not a technologist. I am a commercial operator who went through the first digital transformation cycle, watched it get fixed, and can recognize the missed step from a mile away because I have seen it twice now. That experience spans 25 years across PE-backed, middle market, Fortune 500, and multi-entity environments. I spent 15 years at General Motors across the Middle East, China, Latin America, and Africa. As CMO of Legence (Nasdaq: LGN), a Blackstone-backed platform, I built the marketing org through a full rebrand and Nasdaq IPO. At Gates Corporation (NYSE: GTES), a $3.7B industrial manufacturer, I led brand transformation across 165 entities and 30 countries. I did not learn this in a classroom. I learned it inside these companies. Fractional CMO. Fractional CCO. AI adoption. Commercial operations. Change management. Go-to-market strategy. AI-enabled marketing. Revenue operations. B2B. PE portfolio companies. Org design. AI practice. Workflow design. If your team is buried in tools, not sure where to start, and still not seeing the efficiency gains AI was supposed to deliver, that is exactly where I come in. Open to fractional CMO and CCO engagements and select full-time opportunities.