The deployment funnel nobody talks about: 60% evaluate, 20% pilot, 5% ship. MIT tracked 300 real AI implementations against profit metrics.

Late 2025, MIT researchers measured something the industry had avoided looking at directly. Not projections or pilot numbers. Documented outcomes from 300 AI deployments in real businesses, tracked against profit metrics. The funnel breaks down like this. Sixty percent of companies evaluated AI tools. Of those, twenty percent ran a pilot. Of those pilots, only 5% reached full production deployment on the service line. Ninety-five percent of AI investment dissolved before it produced a measurable outcome. The companies that made it to production had a clear pattern.