Enterprises Don't Need Artificial General Intelligence. They Need Artificial Specific Intelligence
CIO, Thursday, October 22nd, 2026
An author argues that enterprise AI pilots fail because general-purpose model benchmarks don't match a company's actual requirements.
The author, who wrote the book Transform!, starts from MIT's finding that 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail to show profit, arguing that neither weak models nor inept users explain it and that the real problem is whose definition of success is being measured.
He points to Bain data showing only 5% of digital transformations met expectations even before ChatGPT.
Labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic optimize for general intelligence using benchmarks that don't reflect what happens inside a real business, and their models are frozen at training time and never learn a company's specifics.
The author calls instead for "artificial specific intelligence" that is aligned with the enterprise's own requirements.