A recent MIT report (The State of AI in Business 2025) put it starkly: 95% of organizations fail to generate real value from GenAI. Most never get past pilots and proofs of concept.
But there’s a 5% that do succeed — not just with experiments, but with profitable, scaled outcomes.
So, what’s different about them? And more importantly, what could the rest of us learn?
At Valtech, working alongside clients across various industries, we’ve seen the patterns first-hand. The 5% aren’t performing magic — they’re behaving differently. They adopt certain mindsets that allow them to turn technology into results. And those behaviors are repeatable.
They bridge the gap between process and AI
This is the first and most critical behavior.
Process owners often don’t know what AI can and can’t do. AI experts rarely understand the messy variation of real-world processes. The result? Misaligned expectations, missed opportunities and frustration.
Think of it like trying to scale car production. For a one-off, you might hammer aluminum into shape. For a few hundred, you might use fiberglass molds. For millions, you need pressed steel.
When asked to scale, too many teams simply hire more people with hammers — not because they’re foolish but because they don’t know what else is possible.
The 5% do something different: they put process experts and AI experts in the same room. They encourage honesty about what’s feasible and what isn’t. And they work together to close the gaps.
That collaboration is where scaling starts.
They think in products, not projects
The second behavior is product thinking.
The 5% begin with the customer problem — the pain point, the unmet need. Because if you’re not solving for customers, you’re not relevant.
But they don’t stop there. They look at strategy: does this solution align with where the organization is going? Does it position us to compete on trust, service, price or something else that matters?
And then they ask: can we do this? Not in a vague way, but with a clear-eyed view of what AI can deliver today, where their own capabilities stand and where they need to test and learn.
Product thinking is about holding three focus areas together — customer, strategy and feasibility — and then finding the sweet spot in between.
The 5% apply this discipline to AI. They don’t let GenAI become R&D chaos. They make it a product.
They build a culture that learns and scales
This is less visible, but it’s decisive. Culture is where you see the real differences between the 95% and the 5%.
In the 5%:
- Failure is data, not a career risk. They place small bets, learn quickly and scale the ones that work.
- Governance is an enabler, not a blocker. Bias, security and compliance are thought through from the start, so teams move faster.
- Data foundations are ready. Clean, integrated and governed. Without it, AI goes nowhere.
- Tacit knowledge becomes explicit. For example, one of our client’s team members could always recommend the perfect product in person, but their website consistently got it wrong. We fixed that by capturing what staff knew and turning it into data AI could use.
- Change isn’t bolted on. Solutions are embedded into workflows so people trust and adopt them.
These are cultural muscles. And the 5% keep them fit.
They focus on outcomes, not outputs
Finally, the 5% are obsessed with outcomes.
It’s tempting to measure what’s easy: more clicks, more emails, more activity. But activity is not value.
The 5% look for impact:
- Time saved
- Costs avoided
- Revenue generated
- Customer experience uplifted
For another client in the entertainment industry, the real measure of success wasn’t clicks — it was TVs sold as a leading outcome and viewing time uplifted as a trailing one.
From the very first thin slice, the 5% measure ROI. They don’t wait for a mythical big bang.
The behaviors that matter
If there’s a thread running through all of this, it’s that the 5% behave differently. They:
- Bridge the gap between process and AI with cross-functional honesty.
- Apply product thinking to balance customer, strategy and feasibility.
- Build cultural muscles that make learning and scaling natural.
- Stay focused on outcomes, not outputs.
These aren’t checklists — they’re ways of leading, thinking and showing up as an organization.
The behaviors of the 5% aren’t complicated, but they are deliberate. They build trust between experts, turn discipline into decisions and embed resilience into culture. Above all, they measure what matters.
The organizations in the 5% don’t have all the answers. What they do have is a way of showing up — by being curious, pragmatic and prepared to change. That is what keeps them ahead.
The real question isn’t can you use GenAI, but whether you’re willing, as a leader, to adopt the behaviors that turn potential into profit.
At Valtech, we’re helping organizations across sectors do exactly that — delivering outcomes, not outputs, and making GenAI profitable in practice.
The Valtech Product team posts weekly on ProductBreaks.com about the real world of delivering value to customers and organizations through your products.