A bonus release from the Inner Circle feed, made available to all listeners. Weekly article readings are normally reserved for Inner Circle members; this is the opening piece of a four-part series, opened more widely as a way in. The remaining three articles are available to read at robert.winter.ink or to hear on the Inner Circle's private podcast feed. Join the Inner Circle at robert.winter.ink

For nine consecutive years, three of the world's most influential research operations have surveyed thousands of executives on artificial intelligence. The technology has matured through three or four generational shifts. The proportion of organisations capturing real financial value from any of it has remained, with a stubbornness that is almost dignified, somewhere between five and twenty per cent. This article sets out the longitudinal evidence, names the half-lie that allows the contemporary conversation to ignore it, and previews the three pieces to follow.

In This Article

• The technology has changed enormously. The numbers have not. MIT and BCG in 2017 found that five per cent of companies had extensively incorporated AI; McKinsey in 2025 finds six per cent capturing meaningful EBIT impact. The proportion has moved within a narrow band for nearly a decade.
• "AI is moving too fast for the surveys to be reliable" is the half-lie at the centre of the executive conversation. The technology is moving fast at the level of model capability. It is not moving fast at the level of enterprise value capture, which is the level a board needs to care about. The conflation provides cover for the executive who cannot deliver.
• Research for Governing Digital with Courage and Clarity surfaced an unusual pattern of anonymity. Contributors who saw the landscape clearly were happy to be named. Those insisting on the convenient lie — that the inconvenient findings were stale — would only speak unattributed.
• Trollope worked out the social mechanics 150 years ago. In The Way We Live Now (1875), Augustus Melmotte raises capital across London society for a railway that will never be built. The fraud is not in the prospectus. The fraud is in the dinner.
• These numbers are the empirical case for the saviour industrial complex thesis: the substitution of expensive acquisition and confident signalling for the patient development of organisational capacity.
• Three pieces follow this one. The Permanent Pilot examines why only a quarter of organisations have moved AI to production after nine years of trying. The Theatre of Transformation examines the gap between deep-transformation claims and the absence of job redesign. The Books That Don't Balance, reserved for Inner Circle members, ties the threads together with a six-question diagnostic for boards.

A Thought With Which To Sit

Those who tell whole lies are merely concealing the truth. Those who tell half-lies have forgotten where they put it.

Coming Up

The remaining three articles in the series are available to read on the site and to hear on the Inner Circle's private podcast feed. Subscribe via the Commons at robert.winter.ink for site access, or join the Inner Circle for the audio.

Further Reading

• Trollope, A. — The Way We Live Now (1875).
• Ransbotham, S., Kiron, D., Gerbert, P., & Reeves, M. — Reshaping Business with Artificial Intelligence (2017).
• McKinsey & Company — The State of AI in 2025: Agents, Innovation, and Transformation (2025).
• Khurana, R. — Searching for a Corporate Savior: The Irrational Quest for Charismatic CEOs (2002).