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May 7, 2026 by David Such Leave a Comment

Why 95% of AI Deployments Fail

MIT’s August 2025 study of 300 enterprise generative AI deployments found that 95% produced no measurable P&L impact. Gartner forecasts that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be cancelled by 2027. McKinsey’s State of AI 2025 identifies workflow redesign as the single strongest correlate with EBIT impact, yet only 21% of organisations have redesigned any workflows. The data converges on a structural conclusion: enterprise AI is failing because the operational substrate is inadequate, not because the models are. This episode examines the process-readiness gap, the misallocation pattern that concentrates investment in low-ROI front-office applications, and what the 5% of high performers do differently. It is an architectural argument, not a change-management one: AI is a linear amplifier acting on a pre-existing process, and the sign of the output depends on the sign of the input.

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Filed Under: AI, Embedded, Title Post Tagged With: embedded AI, podcast

About David Such

David Such is an embedded systems engineer and Director of Reefwing Software, based in Sydney, Australia. He develops IoT devices, robotics platforms, and drone flight control systems, with a focus on deploying intelligence on resource-constrained hardware.

David has over 30 years of industry experience spanning embedded development, systems engineering, and senior leadership. He has held executive roles including Managing Director of Serco Australia and senior management positions at Honeywell and Tyco. He was an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney, where he mentored aspiring entrepreneurs through the Business Industry Mentoring Program and the Lean Startup course in the Faculty of Business.

His open-source sensor fusion and flight controller libraries, published under the Reefwing Software organisation on GitHub, are used by embedded developers and robotics hobbyists worldwide. He writes extensively on embedded AI, sensor systems, and edge computing across several publications on Medium, where his technical articles have built a substantial following among hardware engineers working at the edge.

David holds a BE in Electrical Engineering, a BSc in Computing Science and Physics, a BAppSc, and an MBA in Strategy.

Embedded AI: A Practical Guide to Building Intelligence on Microcontrollers is his first book with No Starch Press.

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A chip that controls a balancing propeller on seven microwatts

May 14, 2026 By David Such Leave a Comment

Every battery-powered device you own has a quiet energy hog in it that nobody talks about. It is not the processor, it is not the radio, and it is not the screen. It is the analog-to-digital converter, the small piece of circuitry that translates the messy real world into the clean ones and zeros a […]

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