AI & Automation

You will hear small business owners ask which chatbot to buy. It is the first question on their lips, but also the wrong one to begin with. You should be asking what you need the bot to do in a given corner of your operation: are you looking to capture leads, book an appointment, offload […]

The hardest part of buying generative AI is not picking the model. It is finding a partner who will tell you when your idea is too broad, your data is not ready, and a workflow change would beat the build. That kind of judgment is rare, and it is exactly what separates a generative AI […]

Do the numbers for a senior AI engineer in New York and you are looking at $350,000 to $500,000 fully loaded. Put in the salary, benefits, recruiter fees, equipment and management overhead and that is what it runs. Then look at Clarista’s 2026 compensation analysis: put the same person on staff in India, Eastern Europe […]

Most AI engagements do not fail because the model was wrong. They fail before the model is chosen. The business problem is fuzzy, the data sits in three systems nobody owns, and the launch plan stops at the demo. Stanford’s 2026 AI Index reports that 88% of organizations now use AI in some form, yet […]

You will see a wide variance in the numbers when you look at enterprise AI. Vendors will tell you their success rate is over 60 per cent, but an independent audit of such projects puts the figure for those that hit business objectives on the first try at between 20 and 35 per cent. That […]

You can take it from MIT’s NANDA initiative: after reviewing 300 enterprise generative AI deployments, they concluded some 95% had no discernible effect on the P&L. ISG came to much the same conclusion in their 2025 survey of enterprises, though they put a finer point on it by noting that of all the use cases […]

You won’t find the hard part of an ERP AI bot in the model itself. It is in the periphery: the data plumbing, identity and audit concerns, change management, and the thorny issue of who to blame when the bot makes a mistake. The numbers bear this out. Stanford’s 2026 AI Index tells us 88% […]

At your next product meeting you will hear it: “We can put an agent around it, or fine-tune later and let RAG handle the rest.” You will find yourself nodding along with the room, even as you ask yourself if you have just committed to a chatbot, a search engine or some kind of autonomous […]

You could say the average loyalty program is little more than a coupon dispenser with a points ledger. A customer will sign up, put your emails in the junk folder and only ever redeem what was already on their shopping list. The program chugs along but it does not learn. If one of your regulars […]