Harvard Business Review is running sponsored content titled “A Blueprint for Enterprise-Wide Agentic AI Transformation.”
Accenture has committed $3 billion to its AI practice.
McKinsey’s QuantumBlack has grown to 5,000 AI specialists.
Wipro just launched a new operating model combining “advisory, AI, and enterprise transformation services.”
Deloitte, BCG, Bain — every firm that sold you digital transformation is back with the same slide deck, a new prefix, and the same word.
Transformation.
Digital transformation had a 70% failure rate. That’s not a disputed number — McKinsey published it about their own clients. $2.3 trillion wasted globally on failed digital transformation programs. Companies spent an average of $27 million per initiative; 87% failed to meet their stated goals.
Now those same firms, with those same failure rates, are selling AI transformation. MIT’s 2025 State of AI in Business report found that 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots are failing to show measurable returns. Bain’s own research shows that for every 33 AI pilots a company launches, 4 make it to production. That’s an 88% failure rate on scaling: essentially the exact same number as digital transformation. Same disease, different vector.
This is not a coincidence. It’s the same people.
I’m a scientist. In science, when we say “transformation” without qualification, we mean cellular transformation — the process where normal cells undergo genetic and epigenetic alterations, becoming malignant, immortalized, and capable of independent proliferation.
The formation of cancer.
Digital transformation was corporate cancer. Metastatic consulting engagements that spread across departments, immortalized themselves through multi-year contracts, and proliferated independently of any measurable outcome. The tumors outlived the patients. Companies that underwent “digital transformation” often emerged with new org charts, new enterprise software nobody asked for, and a bill that would have funded the actual engineering work three times over.
AI transformation is the same malignancy with a higher growth rate. The consulting firms aren’t even bothering to change the playbook — they’re changing the adjective. Deloitte is scrapping traditional job titles to “modernize” around AI. Accenture is equipping “tens of thousands of professionals” with ChatGPT Enterprise. The market for AI consulting is
projected to exceed $30 billion. The only thing growing faster than the spend is the failure rate.
Transformation is never good.
Not in biology, not in business. Transcendence usually is — different T word, different outcome. But transcendence requires actually understanding the technology, not wrapping it in a twelve-month engagement model designed to renew.
If we’re going to do enterprise AI — and we should, because the technology is real — can we at least retire the word that’s been attached to $2.3 trillion in documented failure? The consultants won’t, because “transformation” is the word that sells the retainer. But the rest of us can stop buying it.
Sources:
- https://fortune.com/2025/08/18/mit-report-95-percent-generative-ai-pilots-at-companies-failing-cfo/
- https://newsroom.taylorandfrancisgroup.com/costly-business-overhauls-are-not-needed-to-embrace-new-digital-technologies-according-to-specialist/
- https://blog.meltingspot.io/why-digital-transformation-projects-fail/
- https://hbr.org/sponsored/2026/02/a-blueprint-for-enterprise-wide-agentic-ai-transformation
- https://newsroom.accenture.com/news/2025/openai-and-accenture-accelerate-enterprise-reinvention-with-advanced-ai
- https://hoba.tech/business-transformation-predictions-2026-failure-rate/