A podcast published April 6 by Telecom Reseller, featuring Expereo CIO Jean-Philippe Avelange, said what many enterprise leaders have been dancing around:
“Now it’s much more about accountability,” he said. “We need to see metrics moving.” Short sentence. Big shift.
2024 was the year everyone got curious about AI.
2025 was the year everyone deployed something.
2026 is the year the bill comes due.
Proof-of-concept decks aren’t moving boardrooms anymore. Boards want evidence that AI improves cycle times, cuts costs, and raises service quality. For those in business development, this is a huge change in how enterprise deals are made or lost.
The Gap Between “Deployed” and “Delivering”
97% of executives say their organization benefits from AI. Yet according to the 2026 Enterprise AI Adoption Survey by Writer, only 29% report substantial organizational ROI. Almost everyone is running something, but few can prove it’s working at scale.
Gartner’s data tells a similar story. While 78% of organizations have run AI pilots, only 35% have successfully scaled those efforts into concrete business value.
Analysts are starting to call this “pilot purgatory”, aka a state where promising projects look great in controlled demos but stall out before they ever touch production. Nobody decides who actually owns the thing once the pilot ends. AI tools that seem cheap during testing get expensive when you’re running them across thousands of daily transactions.
Meanwhile, individual team members might actually be working faster, but nobody’s connecting those personal wins to a number the CFO can bring to the next board meeting.
Why Enterprise Buyers Are Quickly Cutting Vendors
There’s just no more patience for ambiguity anymore. Teams have hardened their criteria, so tools that can’t demonstrate ROI within about 90 days are getting cut.
Right now, investors are watching that play out. Databricks Ventures says 2026 is the year enterprises redirect budgets towards whatever has actually proven its value. Snowflake Ventures says CIOs are pruning SaaS sprawl and moving towards unified platforms.
Here’s What Gets AI Across the Finish Line:
Avelange’s advice from the podcast is this:
Start with the boring processes.
The unglamorous, repetitive tasks are actually the best place to start. They’re easy to measure, govern, and prove. Nail those first, and scaling into bigger, more complex use cases becomes a logical next step rather than a leap of faith.
It’s also important where AI gets plugged in. Dropping a chatbot into an existing workflow is rarely useful. What actually works is AI built into the process itself, with clear ownership, defined inputs, and agreed-upon success metrics established before the pilot starts.
This distinction is something Sam Miri understands from two decades of taking technology products into enterprise markets across hardware, software, and connected devices. AI does not scale on excitement. It scales on accountability.
What This Means for BD Leaders in 2026
Selling on vision alone doesn’t work anymore. Enterprise buyers are treating AI like any other major investment. It has to justify its spot in the budget every single quarter.
BD leaders who show up with real ROI data and clear milestones will come out on top. Those still leading with potential will get cut when the next round of vendor consolidation hits.
Sam Miri’s bottom line: the companies that pull ahead won’t be the ones with the flashiest technology. They’ll be the ones who tied measurable value to their work from day one and can prove it when the board asks the question every board is now asking—what are we actually getting for this?
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