I recently attended a dinner with a group of senior marketing and IT executives from some of Chicago’s largest companies. The conversation was lively and centered around, you guessed it, AI.
Everyone in the room was doing something with AI:
- A chatbot pilot here
- Some copy generation there
- A lead scoring experiment in progress
But the pattern was clear: a dozen disconnected pilots and proof-of-concepts (POCs), very few with executive sponsorship, and even fewer tied to clear business goals.
That’s when I used a phrase that I’ve found myself repeating lately: AI is still sitting at the kids’ table.
Why That Analogy Still Works
AI has been formally “invited” to the organization, it’s no longer fringe. But it hasn’t earned a full seat in strategic planning. It's not driving GTM strategy, customer experience design, or budget allocation in most orgs.
If you’ve been in marketing long enough, you’ve seen this pattern before:
- Mobile: Once treated like a novelty (“We need an app!”), now an integral part of the customer lifecycle.
- CRM: Formerly siloed within Sales, now the marketing backbone.
- CDPs: Once seen as overbuilt infrastructure, now powering personalized journeys.
- Personalization Engines: From “Hi, [First Name]” gimmicks to real-time, data-driven relevance.
In each case, the technology remained sidelined until someone tied it to customer outcomes, business impact, and operational strategy.
The McDonald’s Example: When High Profile Isn’t Enough
A perfect case in point: McDonald’s and IBM.
In 2021, McDonald’s launched an AI-powered voice ordering pilot in more than 100 drive-thru locations, developed in partnership with IBM. This wasn’t a rogue side project, it had executive-level visibility, strong vendor backing, and real customer exposure.
But the system struggled:
- It failed to recognize accents and natural speech
- It bungled complex orders
- It frustrated customers and employees
By mid-2024, the pilot was shut down.
Even with scale, budget, and public support, it lacked the operational readiness and accuracy needed to create value. It wasn't a back-office test, it was customer-facing. The stakes were high. And it fell short.
This is what happens when AI is treated like a bolt-on experiment rather than embedded into process design and customer experience.
What the Research Says
And McDonald’s isn’t alone. According to CIO.com and TechSee:
- 88% of AI pilots fail to reach production.
- Many AI projects falter because they’re disconnected from revenue strategy and operational workflows.
- CIOs are beginning to abandon custom in-house POCs in favor of commercialized AI platforms (like OpenAI, Vertex AI, Salesforce Einstein) that integrate faster and provide clearer value paths.
The problem isn’t the technology.
It’s that we treat pilots as strategy, and we confuse experimentation with execution.
The Risk of Too Many POCs
POCs are useful, but they’re not a strategy.
They become a problem when:
- There’s no shared roadmap for what happens after “test”
- They aren’t connected to KPIs or data infrastructure
- No one owns scaling or operationalizing them
- They aren’t part of the customer journey or marketing lifecycle
Disconnected AI = disconnected value.
So… Is AI Still at the Kids’ Table?
In most companies, yes.
But it doesn’t have to stay there.
If you're a marketing leader, ask yourself:
- Is our AI roadmap connected to our customer journey?
- Are we treating AI as infrastructure or just a novelty?
- Who owns turning successful pilots into scaled programs?
AI moves to the main table when it drives outcomes, not when it wins headlines.
Welcome to the Blog & What's Next
Welcome to my new personal blog! I plan to explore topics like the practical application of AI in marketing further in the coming months.
I'll be writing more on how marketers can go from AI dabbling to measurable impact.
Stay tuned right here on mikehotz.com for future posts, or connect with me on LinkedIn to follow along.
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