"80% of AI projects fail" traces to a footnote one line long
"80% of AI projects fail" traces to a footnote one line longJWJamie WattersOperational resilience and AI delivery practitioner. Technology since 1985.Published: 21 August 2026•6 min read#ai#evidence#research#project-failureThe chain, followed upstream one hop at a time, until it runs out.You have seen the number. Eighty per cent of AI projects fail, roughly twice the rate of conventional IT projects.
- ▪"80% of AI projects fail" traces to a footnote one line longJWJamie WattersOperational resilience and AI delivery practitioner.
- ▪Technology since 1985.Published: 21 August 2026•6 min read#ai#evidence#research#project-failureThe chain, followed upstream one hop at a time, until it runs out.You have seen the number.
- ▪Eighty per cent of AI projects fail, roughly twice the rate of conventional IT projects.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Jamie Watters |
| Canonical URL | https://jamiewatters.work/journey/80-percent-ai-projects-fail |
| Publication time | Mon, 21 Sep 2026 20:02:47 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-21T20:13:49.217Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-21T20:13:49.217Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | cHmbSccL1lf9 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
"80% of AI projects fail" traces to a footnote one line longJWJamie WattersOperational resilience and AI delivery practitioner. Technology since 1985.Published: 21 August 2026•6 min read#ai#evidence#research#project-failureThe chain, followed upstream one hop at a time, until it runs out.You have seen the number. Eighty per cent of AI projects fail, roughly twice the rate of conventional IT projects. It is in the pitch decks, the board papers, the conference keynotes and the LinkedIn posts. I have seen it used to justify buying software and to justify not buying software, which should have been the first clue. I went looking for the study behind it. There isn't one. The chain The citation almost everyone reaches for is RAND.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Jamie Watters.
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