Myth Number 2: MIT Showed That 95% of AI Pilots Fail

Perhaps the most commonly quoted statistics about AI projects is that 95% of them fail, according to MIT. It has been quoted by Fortune, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and a long tail of content that is still, in 2026, using “95% of AI pilots flop” as a hook to sell the very thing the study was supposedly warning us about.
It is a wonderful statistic. It is shocking, it carries an elite institutional badge, it confirms what a tired and sceptical audience already suspected, and it is short enough to survive a thousand reposts. There is only one problem, it does not say what almost everyone thinks it says.

AI Myth Number 1: AI Cannot Produce Anything New

AI only repeats what it was taught. That is a comforting line that appears whenever AI comes up in research conversations. AI is framed as an assistant, a parrot, a tool, a very fast intern with a big knowledge base and sometimes a flaky memory, but no imagination. The implication is reassuring, because it suggests the interesting thinking is still safely ours. But it is a myth.