Published on LinkedIn and amitabhapte.com on 28th Dec 2025
This week in AI – The State of Enterprise AI, 2025
The State of Enterprise AI 2025 from OpenAI report offers a timely and necessary reality check.
AI adoption is no longer the challenge. Delivering consistent, repeatable business impact is.
Most large organisations now deploy AI across multiple functions. Yet only a minority report meaningful value at scale. The gap between experimentation and transformation remains stubbornly wide.
Three signals from the report stand out.
1. AI is now a leadership mandate.
AI has moved firmly onto board and executive agendas. The conversation has shifted from “Should we adopt AI?” to “Why aren’t we scaling it faster?”. This pressure is cascading rapidly through organisations, often faster than operating models, skills, and governance structures can adapt.
2. Pilots are plentiful. Scale is rare.
Enterprises are running many AI initiatives, but few are embedded into core workflows. The barriers are not model capability. They are data quality, integration complexity, unclear ownership, skills gaps, and organisational inertia. In short, enterprise readiness, not technology, is the limiting factor.
3. Focus determines value.
Companies seeing returns are selective. They prioritise a small number of high-impact use cases, redesign processes end to end, and invest deliberately in governance, skills, and change management. AI succeeds when it becomes part of how work gets done, not when it is layered on top of existing processes.
One pattern is unmistakable. AI investment is rising sharply, but productivity gains are not rising at the same pace. That gap defines the current phase of enterprise AI.
My takeaway this weekend
Enterprise AI has entered its execution phase. This is no longer about experimentation or tooling. It is about operating discipline, clear decision rights, and cultural adoption.
The organisations that win will be those that industrialise AI with the same rigour they apply to finance, supply chain, or manufacturing. AI advantage will be built through focus, integration, and sustained leadership attention, not through volume of pilots.
Beyond AI: my mindshare – Great TV Endures
As the holiday period starts, the Times 100 Best TV Shows of 2025 makes for a good read. A few personal favourites made the list, including Netflix’s Adolescence, Apple TV’s Slow Horses, and the BBC’s The Celebrity Traitors. What have you been watching this year?
Amitabh Apte 