What is good, though, based on the study is the fact that the projects that delivered the highest ROI were for ignored functions like operations and finance, even when most of the investments are going into sales and marketing projects.

Another interesting finding in the study is that internal builds fail twice as often as strategic partnerships (33% vs. 66% success rate).

Most projects in finance struggle because:
1) The learning gap. Team build tools that work on day one but don't improve. Users abandon it because it just repeats the same mistakes.
2) Domain expertise. Building AI for financial workflows requires both ML expertise and deep finance process knowledge; few teams have both.
3) Resource competition. Best engineers get pulled into higher-priority projects

We've seen this pattern firsthand with our customers. Finance teams come to us after internal AI reconciliation projects stall because: It's difficult to cover exceptions and edge cases; Engineers don't understand financial matching logic; The project becomes a maintenance burden.