It’s the Pilot, Not the Plane: Why Fast-Tracking AI Fails Unless Your Input Is Solid

The Hype vs. the Hard Truth

AI is everywhere. It’s in the boardroom, in the news, in the hands of employees downloading their own apps just to “keep up.” The pressure to “do something with AI” is so high that many leaders rush to roll out tools, tick the innovation box, and call it progress.

The pressure is real. 

But MIT’s State of AI in Business 2025 report cuts through the noise with one sobering statistic: 95% of generative AI pilots fail to deliver measurable ROI. Only 5% succeed.

That isn’t a technology failure—it’s a leadership/human failure. The problem isn’t the plane. It’s the pilot. I have spent the last 4 years giving this key note and workshop message: no matter what state of the art tools you have - without clear direction and a desired outcome - you can still get an average output. 

More than ever - our vision, strategy and aligned input from all levels within organisations matter. Since I love a good Top Gun theme: Taking flight with AI, means there are some necessary pre-flight checks and in flight operational efficiencies we need to all address before we deploy a fancy new tools:

Check 1: Input First, Always

You don’t climb into a cockpit and say, “Let’s just see where this goes.” You set a destination, you chart a flight plan, you know your instruments.

AI is no different. Without a clear mission, you’re just burning fuel.

For example every project we run with our clients now starts with the AI Aligned™ Checklist—a structured approach to define:

• Outcome clarity: What business problem are we solving? For ourselves and for our customers.
• Vital data inputs: What’s essential, what’s noise?
• Ownership: Who is accountable for the outputs?
• Metrics: How will we know this worked? Margins, productivity, accuracy, total market?
• Governance: What guardrails protect us from risk?

Leaders who skip this step chase hype instead of results. Leaders who nail this step accelerate ROI by months, sometimes years. 

Even those completely new to AI as a business solution, who have been running for 35years with paper trails and personnel holding the IP - are required now to think about these critical metrics. These are the foundations for success regardless of tech. 

Check 2: Guardrails Empower, Not Restrict

MIT found that up to 90% of employees are already using personal AI tools—what’s often called “shadow AI.” Why? Because official pilots are slow, unclear, or not relevant to their work. Heather Jerrehian and I spoke about this while recording our micro podcast last week. If you want your employees to be transparent, you need to be clear as well.

The danger isn’t employees experimenting—it’s employees doing so without guardrails. When people don’t feel safe, they go underground. That’s where data leakage, compliance breaches, and 'reputational' risk live.

But guardrails are not about clipping wings. They’re about empowerment. GPS coordinates that keep us on the right track

Over the last 24 months we have designed more than 100 custom, private dashboards that function like an AI health check for organisations and are now working with Actualisation AI to ensure - once the vital data and workflows are identified - that this can be kept in a secure and completely private ecosystem (aka your own AI factory). The mission we have:

• keep data inside the business.
• integrate the vital information teams actually need to make decisions.
• provide transparency on what’s happening, where, and why.
• make AI visible, not mysterious.

When employees understand the “why” behind the rules, adoption skyrockets. Guardrails turn uncertainty into confidence.

Check 3: Friction Creates ROI

The instinct in business is to minimise friction. To make adoption “smooth.” But as MIT warns, this is a trap.

AI that appears flawless in a demo often collapses in reality, because it was never tested against the messy, human friction of the workplace or the vast amounts of chaos when info is not organised effectively.

The most successful organisations don’t avoid friction—they lean into it. They use it to:

• Stress-test assumptions.
• Catch “confidently wrong” outputs before they cause damage.
• Build systems that learn from correction.

I call this designing humble AI. Tools that admit uncertainty, flag when they’re guessing, and invite human feedback. This not only builds trust—it accelerates ROI.

Friction is not failure. Friction is feedback.

Check 4: ROI Is also in the Back Office, Not the Showroom

50–60% of AI budgets go into sales and marketing (once again a recent MIT stat)—chatbots, customer experience tools, lead-gen engines. The glossy, customer-facing stuff. This is certainly where the revenue generating activities arise - and cashflow is king.

While doing that use this time to ensure your back office is organised as well. Decluttering and organising operations to be able to handle the growth. 

HR, finance, customer data, operations, compliance. These areas rarely make headlines, but they:

• Save millions in outsourcing and agency fees.
• Free up hours of manual, repetitive work.
• Give leaders real-time data they can trust.

It’s not glamorous, but it’s effective. And effective wins.

Check 5: Partnerships Beat DIY

Partnerships deliver deployment success at ~66%, while internal builds succeed only ~33% of the time. Currently there are many ways to truly improve your output. Working with proven experts who thrive and have deep experience is so critical. 

As an organisation with a key visionary pillar, and although we design so much of the strategy ourselves now - we need to partner with proven experts in AI and systems delivery. Those that have not popped up overnight - but have years of proven experience and understand the varying needs, levels and environments our clients operate in. 

The reason? Piloting a plane you built yourself, mid-flight, is a dangerous strategy - especially if there is an unforeseen issue you had not anticipated. Experienced co-pilots shorten the runway and help you land safely. 

This team work has enabled us to have stronger planning, risk assessment and solid foundations to build from and be agile with as tools and tech evolve.

This doesn’t mean outsourcing everything. It means co-creation: leadership retains ownership, but taps into domain expertise to accelerate, de-risk, and future-proof.

Where Leaders Go Wrong? There is no perfect, we learn from our mistakes but when you're scaling with AI the risk is 10x 

Too often, leaders/directives:

• Fast-track AI to “look innovative” rather than solve real problems.
• Measure success by how many tools they rolled out, not what changed in the business.
• Avoid the friction that actually teaches the system.
• Ignore the “shadow AI” economy happening under their noses.
• Forget they don't need all the answers and deployment means a shared communication with ALL levels of the organisation.

And then they wonder why the ROI never materialises. FOMO is not a strategy to deploy from.

So what to do: Crossing the Divide: Use A Practical Playbook. 

To avoid becoming part of the 95% who fail, leaders need to rethink their approach. Here’s the FlightMap model we use:

1. Run the AI Aligned™ Checklist – Clarify the problem, inputs, ownership, metrics, and governance.
2. Set Guardrails Early – Create private, inclusive dashboards where employees can safely experiment.
3. Expect and Embrace Friction – Build systems that learn, adapt, and invite correction.
4. Target Back-Office Wins – Find ROI in the “unglamorous” areas where inefficiencies bleed value.
5. Co-Pilot, Don’t Solo – Partner with experts who’ve flown these routes before.
6. Build it with culture in mind along the way. The human aspect is more important than you think. If that's not first - I'd be questioning your goals. 

My Final Thought: Pilot Over Plane

You can buy the most advanced aircraft in the world. But without a trained pilot, a clear flight plan, and the right instruments, you won’t get off the ground. AI can take you so far with that yes.

We know AI can power warships and aircraft. However what is the outcome desired? If we are looking to thrive, improve our workplaces, significance and market share - it can't all be about tactics. 

We know every action has a reaction.

If we are truly here to improve job satisfaction, community engagement, happiness, profit and longevity. Therefore before we rush out to deploy a new system that makes life easier, go faster and do more - ask for your business as much as your teams: What do we really want, need and where are we going?

AI is the same. The ROI doesn’t come from speed or spectacle—it comes from clarity, guardrails, and empowered people. The organisations that succeed will be the ones that remember: it’s not the plane that matters. It’s the pilot.

My mission is to remove the barriers, share as much information as we can and improve the alignment for human potential and AI.

We are all part of the solution.

Have a radical day.

Nikki

Grab the super simple AI Aligned Checklist here.

If you want a done for you private AI Aligned Dashboard that tracks each pillar of the business, quality input, clarity on tools and flight path for your AI integration, starting with figuring out what matters most and how to get all your key info into one place effortlessly then we would love to help. [email protected]

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Nikki Fogden-Moore is a globally recognised strategist, author, and founder of The Mojo Maker® Group, ACCELER8TE™, and ClaraLuna AI—a human-led AI platform supporting conscious leadership and performance at scale. With 20+ years across brand strategy, elite sport, and executive coaching, she’s the author of Vitality, Fitpreneur, and Radical Self-Belief, and the creator of frameworks including Winning Weeks®, FounderFITness, The Vitality RoadMap, and the upcoming SuperLeaders book and podcast series.

Nikki partners with CEOs, founders, and teams to align commercial outcomes with personal sustainability. Known for her clarity, intelligence, and impact, she equips leaders to navigate complexity with purpose, performance, and aligned innovation.

Our next award winning Boardroom Retreat© with an Aligned AI deep dive is October 24th - 26th Noosa Heads. Featuring Aaron Zamykal from Actualisation AI, Dave Murphy Flow State Coach and Ashleigh Greaves from Simplefy AI. For more info [email protected]