The week in brief — AI's value is decided before the model

Four lessons this week, one common thread: AI's value is decided before the model. McDonald's switched off its voice-ordering pilot after three years and 100 restaurants, with no exit threshold written in advance; only 9% of production models are fine-tuned while 51% rely on RAG; 43% of SMEs and mid-caps do no data analysis to steer their business; and 46% of AI pilots die before production. What separates projects that deliver from projects that disappoint is almost never the model: it is usable data, written decision thresholds, and the discipline to stop. Write into every AI project, from the specification onward, the quantified threshold and review date that trigger scale-up or shutdown.

Sources: McDonald's, end of the IBM voice pilot, June 2024; Menlo Ventures, “The State of Generative AI in the Enterprise,” December 2025 (495 decision-makers); Bpifrance Le Lab, “L'IA dans les PME et ETI françaises,” June 2025 (1,209 executives); S&P Global Market Intelligence, 2025 (1,000+ respondents).