Context
Gartner's original July 2024 prediction (Rita Sallam, Distinguished VP Analyst, on a survey of 822 business leaders): "At least 30% of generative AI projects will be abandoned after proof of concept by the end of 2025, due to poor data quality, inadequate risk controls, escalating costs or unclear business value."
By 2025, harder data confirmed the floor was higher than Gartner predicted. Reported financial outcomes from GenAI deployments in the original Gartner survey: 15.8% saw revenue increases, 15.2% reported cost savings, 22.6% noted productivity improvements. In June 2025 Gartner extended the framing to agentic AI, predicting 40% project cancellation by end of 2027.
What the AI actually does
This is industry-research evidence, not a deployment. The "AI" being measured is enterprise GenAI projects across all sectors, pilots, PoCs, scaled deployments. Abandonment is the outcome variable.
The 2025 confirmation came from three independent studies, all converging on the same picture: enterprise GenAI abandonment is running well above 30%.
Measurable outcomes
- S&P Global / 451 Research (1,006 mid-level and senior IT/LOB respondents, NA + EU): share of companies abandoning most AI initiatives jumped from 17% in 2024 to 42% in 2025; average organisation scrapped 46% of GenAI PoCs before production
- MIT NANDA Initiative (Aug 2025; 150 leader interviews + 350 employee survey + 300 deployments): only ~5% of GenAI pilots achieved rapid revenue acceleration; 95% stalled
- BCG (2025; 1,250 respondents): 60% generate no material value; only 5% generate substantial value at scale
- Gartner (June 2025): 40% of agentic-AI projects predicted cancelled by end of 2027
What to copy
Price the coin-flip into the budget, the timeline, and the political cost of saying "we tried it and stopped."
Per-pilot governance discipline (clear KPI targets, named decision owner, forced kill-criteria, post-mortem if scrapped) solves more than a larger governance committee.
What doesn't transfer
No hospitality-specific GenAI abandonment-rate data has been published by Gartner, Forrester, IDC, S&P/451, MIT, or BCG as of April 2026. The cross-industry data is the floor; whether hospitality is above or below is unknown.
The cleanest named hospitality-adjacent rollbacks are McDonald's IBM AI Drive-Thru (pilot ended across 100+ test restaurants on 26 July 2024, citing accent-recognition and order-accuracy failures), Air Canada (held legally liable in Moffatt v. Air Canada, 2024 BCCRT 149; CAN$812.02 damages February 2024), and Hotels.com chatbot (still ships under-baked).
Open questions before buying
- What is your kill-criterion before you start? If you cannot articulate it, you will not stop.
- Who owns the abandonment decision politically? An unowned pilot drifts forever.
- What is the post-mortem template if it fails? Without one, the next pilot inherits no lessons.
- Does your budget assume a 40–50% probability of abandonment? If not, you are accidentally overcommitted.