Lessons from the Leading Edge: What 420 AI Deployments Reveal About Enterprise Success

In this episode of Inference Time Tactics, Rob, Cooper, and Byron sit down with Shawn Rogers, CEO of BARC US to unpack fresh data from 421 organizations actively deploying AI in production. Shawn shares what separates the 20% of AI leaders from everyone else, why cost surprises are hitting harder than expected, and how the pressure to "just do AI" is causing companies to skip critical foundations—often to their detriment. We talked about:   Why multi-model strategies and small language models are becoming essential for enterprise AI. The seven foundational areas that help AI leaders deploy twice as many projects as everyone else.  Why 51% of deployments face unexpected cost overruns—and which expenses hit hardest.  Data quality jumping to the #1 challenge, affecting 44% of production deployments.  The IT satisfaction paradox: top resource at the start, lowest satisfaction scores at scale.  How responsible AI priorities shifted as human-in-the-loop dropped from 36% to 21%.  Resources Mentioned: Lessons from the Leading Edge: Successful Delivery of AI/GenAI https://barc.com/research/successful-ai-genai-delivery/ Connect with BARC: Website: https://barc.com/  LinkedIn (Shawn Rogers): https://www.linkedin.com/in/shawnrogers/  Connect with Neurometric: Website: https://www.neurometric.ai/  Substack: https://neurometric.substack.com/  X: https://x.com/neurometric/  Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/neurometric.bsky.social Hosts: Rob May https://x.com/robmay  https://www.linkedin.com/in/robmay   Calvin Cooper https://x.com/cooper_nyc_  https://www.linkedin.com/in/coopernyc   Byron Galbraith https://x.com/bgalbraith  https://www.linkedin.com/in/byrongalbraith