March 24, 2026
The 25% your board won't mention
242 business owners were asked what's blocking their AI project.
4% said budget.
Not "it's too expensive." Not "we can't afford it."
4%.
52% said the same thing: "I don't know where to start."
That's the obvious number. The one everyone quotes.
But the number that actually matters is 25%.
61% of these companies had already tried AI. And 25% of them tried it, got limited results, and stopped.
Think about what that means.
They already believe in it. They already spent time and money on it, got the approval internally, selected a vendor, and ran the pilot.
It didn't work.
And now they're not looking for another presentation about what AI can do.
They're looking for someone who can actually deliver.
$15K+ buyers don't have a clarity problem. Their problem is internal.
Team buy-in. Stakeholder alignment. Justifying ROI to a board that nodded yes but now wants proof.
If you walk into that room with a roadmap and a feature list, you lose.
That conversation requires someone who's been in the room before, who already knows what the director of operations is going to say before the meeting starts, and who can help the CEO make the case internally instead of just technically.
That's a completely different kind of work.
44% said their primary goal is to save time.
Time.
Not revenue, not scale, not digital transformation. Time. That word keeps showing up.
"We'll save you X hours per week" lands harder than any growth promise.
Every time.
They gave up on the transformation dream two pilots ago. Now they're drowning in operational weight and they want someone to pull them out of it.
The education phase is over.
The market isn't confused about whether AI works.
They already tried it and they know it can work. What they couldn't do was make it work inside their specific organization, with their specific data, against their specific constraints.
That's not a technology problem.
That's an execution problem.
And execution is the only thing I do.
Bring the failed pilot, the blocked initiative, or the board question nobody wants to own. We will look at the execution problem underneath it.
PD: The market is past the education phase. Your company might not be. That gap is expensive.
PD2: If you're not sure whether the problem is execution or appetite, use the session for that.