Every few weeks, there’s a new headline about a company pouring millions into artificial intelligence with “zero return.” It makes for good clickbait, but it’s also misleading. The reality is that companies are getting value from AI, but they just aren’t looking in the right places. It’s like finding change between the sofa cushions. It has value. You just don’t know it’s there until you look.
Walk through any department in a modern organization and you’ll see AI quietly reshaping work. Marketing teams are drafting content faster. Finance analysts are reconciling spreadsheets in minutes instead of days. Engineers are generating code snippets and testing scenarios. Customer service is leaning on chatbots to resolve tickets before a human ever gets involved.
But here’s the catch: no one’s putting up a banner saying, “We used ChatGPT for this.” Productivity gains are happening in silos and buried in workflows. Gains are credited to working faster, not AI. Like coins lost in the sofa cushions, the value is real, but it’s not tracked or celebrated.
Meanwhile, high-profile “sanctioned AI projects” often sputter. Training custom AI models is complex and expensive. Leaders expect plug-and-play results, but AI requires curation and continuous tuning to become reliable. Without guiding principles, these projects turn into science experiments with no business impact.
That disconnect creates the illusion that AI isn’t paying off. The value is not missing, but it’s leaking out in unmeasured (and unrealized) ways.
Companies seeing success with AI treat it less like a moonshot and more like a playbook. They set guiding principles for where AI should be used, how it should be governed, and how to track its impact. We suggest a pragmatic approach:
Where will it be used? Define use cases that are aligned to strategy, not novelty. Most of the flawed technology implementations we see can be traced back to misalignment with business objectives.
How will you know if it's working? Measure productivity gains (time saved, errors reduced, faster decisions). This will help reveal if and where AI is providing value, where employees are struggling, and if anything needs to change.
Will people actually use it? Encourage adoption across teams while providing guardrails. Don’t throw out an AI tool and expect everyone to immediately know how to use it correctly. Training and communication, especially when it comes to security, is necessary.
Where do you start? Iterate and refine smaller use cases rather than betting on one big project. Demonstrating success on a small scale can secure buy-in, gradually build up in-house expertise, make it easier to measure gains, and contain potential negative impacts without jeopardizing the whole organization.
Check out our guidebook, “Navigating AI Implementation,” for more info on strategies and best practices.
The return on AI isn’t going to look like a sudden spike in revenue. It’s more subtle: fewer late nights, faster decisions, fewer mistakes, and happier employees. Multiply those gains across hundreds or thousands of employees, and you’ve got transformative impact.
So yes, AI is delivering value today. Companies just need to stop searching for a single jackpot project and start recognizing the loose change piling up in the sofa cushions.
At Trenegy, we help organizations take advantage of AI so they see real, scalable value quickly. To chat more, email us at info@trenegy.com.
Trenegy is a non-traditional consulting firm based in Houston, Texas.