​The Gen AI Divide: How to Prioritize AI Projects

The Gen AI Divide isn't just a buzz phrase—it's the title of MIT's recently released research paper, which reveals a harsh reality: 95% of enterprise AI projects don’t deliver ROI. Here’s how to prioritize your company’s AI opportunities for maximum returns.

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If you’ve seen the MIT report The Gen AI Divide: The State of AI in Business 2025, you’ve encountered this sobering statistic: despite $30-40 billion spent on AI, 95% of companies are seeing zero impact from these initiatives on their bottom lines.

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Knowing there’s a problem is most valuable when that knowledge also reveals the solution. The RapidCanvas team speaks with hundreds of companies every year, who tell us that they have either experienced these issues or are anxious to learn from the mistakes of others to ensure that they field AI initiatives that drive strong business results.

One of the key learnings from this study was the importance of identifying and prioritizing projects. This is an area where RapidCanvas brings a wealth of counsel and practical experience. To get the results you want from AI initiatives, you need a clear plan that helps you focus your company on the best opportunities for strong AI ROI in this fiscal year -- ideally in this quarter! In this post, we’ll distill the learnings from MIT and our own experience helping companies to discuss the best way to prioritize initiatives for short- and long-term success.

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A Simple Plan to Cross The Gen AI Divide

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Many organizations dive into AI without an organized plan and project prioritization. Just like any business initiative, it's essential to identify your best opportunities for strong returns.

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By prioritizing projects properly, you can identify those initiatives that:

• Focus on your goals
• Solve specific business problems and remove barriers to growth and profit
• Offer strong returns sooner rather than later
• Require the least amount of organizational and infrastructure change

Here's a five-step prioritization process that can help you quickly identify the best project choices.

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Step 1: Start with Your Company Goals

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Before exploring AI options, review your business goals. Successful AI projects support specific business outcomes, rather than vague promises of “transformation.” By aligning AI initiatives to those goals, you deliver AI in service of top business needs. Whether you want to cut costs by 15%, boost customer satisfaction, speed up product development, or any of a host of other potential goals, these concrete targets should be the guiding foundation for your AI choices.

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Step 2: Find Your Key Problems and Roadblocks

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Map out the specific obstacles stopping you from achieving your top business goals. The best AI projects target the key bottlenecks to growth, rather than trying to change everything at once. Focus on problems where your current approaches are slow, expensive, repetitive or ineffective. Here are some real-world examples where RapidCanvas and its Agentic AI + Human Experts model have added value:

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• Automating invoice reconciliation so tasks that used to take weeks are now performed in  a few hours
• Forecasting that accelerated loan funding decisions so that the company could capture more high-quality consumer loans while reducing bad debt rates
• More flexible manufacturing scheduling to reflect sudden orders and changes in demand
• Batch processing of customer support tickets where multiple users are experiencing the same issues
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Projects like these enhance revenue, reduce costs, empower more nimble operations, and enhance customer satisfaction.

Step 3: Match Your Problems to AI Solutions

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AI delivers value in four powerful areas: intelligent data foundations, smart process automation, advanced insights & predictions, and scaling profitably. Consider each problem you identified against these four areas:  

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• Intelligent Data Foundations: Can AI reconcile, streamline, and rationalize the data your teams struggle with—whether structured (e.g., sales transaction reports, invoicing and A/P, supply chain spreadsheets) or unstructured (contracts, PDFs, call transcripts)? By eliminating over-reliance on Excel and disconnected systems, companies unlock cleaner, more accessible data pipelines that fuel all of their downstream processes.  
• Smart Process Automation: Which necessary but repetitive tasks consume too much time? AI can take on high-volume yet critical workflows—like invoice processing, compliance checks, or HR onboarding—so teams can focus on higher-value strategic initiatives. This frees your people from boring, repetitive tasks without compromising the quality of these essential tasks. Frequently, AI agents can even reduce errors and error rates.  
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• Advanced Insights & Predictions: Where could sharper forecasting help the company grow faster or operate more efficiently? Can AI help power faster decision-making, or extract new insights from your data? From predicting demand and spotting fraud risks to uncovering growth opportunities hidden in customer behavior, AI helps organizations make faster and better decisions more confidently.
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• Profitable Scale: Must business growth automatically have to drive commensurate headcount increases? AI enables scale without proportional staffing increases—whether in customer support, order management, or analyst-heavy functions like account management and market research. These initiatives not only support efficiency but also unlock strategic leverage so your people can focus on relationships, innovation, and growth.
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Step 4: Check Complexity Against Costs and Time

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The key to avoiding the AI divide is matching your approach to your existing resources: time, budget, expertise, and tolerance for complexity. Success comes from being realistic about your current capabilities and choosing a path that yields results quickly and cost-effectively.

Before proceeding with a “build” initiative, assess whether you have the cross-functional resources—spanning IT, data experts, and, most importantly, business leaders who can contextualize problems and reimagine processes with AI—to effectively handle the specific needs of each project. Consider your IT resources, but think beyond IT as well, because AI is not solely a “tech” initiative. It requires a range of resources and expertise that most organizations do not have on their own. Understand the dependencies and the skills needed for success. This is an especially critical set of considerations when you're pursuing time-sensitive tasks that require immediate expertise and rapid deployment."

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According to the study, “buying” AI tools from outside vendors succeeds 67% of the time, while “building” your own only works one-third of the time. But don't just buy any generic SaaS solution—they're often static tools that can't learn from your data or make necessary adjustments to suit your workflows.

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The winning approach often combines Agentic AI with human experts. Using AI agents enables the delivery of autonomy and continuous learning, allowing systems to adapt as needs and opportunities change. The human expert element ensures that your solution is tailored to your needs and is continually monitored to ensure maximum performance. You get proven AI technology plus industry expertise that customizes the solution to your specific processes. This hybrid model delivers faster results than custom builds, better outcomes than generic SaaS, and solutions that actually grow with your business.

Reserve fully custom builds for highly complex, one-of-a-kind projects. For everything else, partner with proven AI vendors who bring both sophisticated technology and human expertise to make it work in your specific context.

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Step 5: Pick Quick Wins First

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One of the most important lessons from this research is this: companies seeing the biggest long-term AI wins started with projects that delivered clear ROI within weeks or months, not years. AI task prioritization systems align effort and potential outcomes for maximum results. It’s often helpful to create a priority matrix that assesses the benefits and costs of possible projects on an “apples-to-apples” basis. This form of a risk-reward matrix helps you compare business opportunities to make more informed business decisions.

Focus your first efforts on projects that are:

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• High Impact, Low Complexity: Projects that solve big business headaches without needing extensive custom development
• Measurable: You can clearly show and communicate success across your company
• Scalable: Solutions that can expand to other use cases once they're proven to work
• Learning-Rich: Projects that build your team's AI skills and confidence for bigger future projects
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Back-office automation is a particularly fruitful area for achieving quick wins. While over half of AI budgets are allocated to sales and marketing tools, the biggest returns often come from cutting outside contractors, reducing agency costs, and streamlining operations. That said, sales and marketing initiatives can also be valuable. The right priorities for you are unique to your goals and opportunities.

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Getting Expert Help: The Key to Crossing The Gen AI Divide

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RapidCanvas has developed an Agentic AI + Human experts hybrid model that directly addresses many of the challenges outlined in The Gen AI Divide research. This approach has been tested with dozens of companies across multiple industries. The model typically delivers measurable ROI within 4-12 weeks -- much faster than traditional AI approaches.

The hybrid model recognizes that successful AI needs both advanced technology and human expertise. Rather than forcing you to choose between building internal capabilities or buying generic solutions, this approach combines proven AI capabilities with experienced professionals who understand both the technology and specific industry challenges.

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Learn how a RapidCanvas AI workshop can help you prioritize projects, set goals, and receive a roadmap for your AI journey in just two days. With 2026 planning starting and budgets being set, there's no better time to define your highest-ROI AI use cases. In just 2 days, our expert-led workshop will help you pinpoint your highest-impact AI opportunities and equip you with a custom implementation roadmap—ready to deploy immediately. Get more information now.