coherent perspective

the receipts

Every claim, with its source.

Our marketing follows the same rule as our engineering: no number without a source, and the flags stay attached. Each figure below was fetched and verified against its URL on 2026-07-10 by an independent fact-check pass. Where a source has known weaknesses, the flag is printed — including on the statistics that flatter us.

Failure and abandonment

42%
Share of companies abandoning most of their AI initiatives jumped from 17% to 42% in one year; the average organization scrapped 46% of AI proof-of-concepts.
S&P Global Market Intelligence survey, 2025 · ciodive.com/news/AI-project-fail-data-SPGlobal/742590
>40%
Gartner predicts more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by end of 2027 — escalating costs, unclear business value, inadequate risk controls.
Gartner press, June 2025 · rcrwireless.com · flag: analyst predictions are marketing for analysts — we treat the direction as signal, the digit as decoration
95%
MIT NANDA's "GenAI Divide" report: ~95% of enterprise GenAI pilots deliver no measurable P&L impact; externally partnered deployments succeed roughly two to three times as often as internal builds.
MIT NANDA via Fortune, Aug 2025 · fortune.com · flag: preprint, small sample, loose failure definition, widely criticized — and it is the single most self-flattering stat an agency can quote. We use the direction, never the digit, and we show you this flag.

The expertise gap in Europe

70.9%
Of EU enterprises that considered AI but did not adopt, the top blocker is lack of in-house expertise — ahead of cost, legal uncertainty, and data-protection fear.
Eurostat, Use of AI in enterprises · ec.europa.eu/eurostat
20.0%
EU enterprises using AI in 2025, up from 13.5% in 2024 — a ~50% relative jump in one year. Small firms adopt at roughly a third of the large-firm rate.
Eurostat, Dec 2025 · ec.europa.eu/eurostat news
1 in 9
Portuguese enterprises using AI — roughly half the EU average. Our home market is near the bottom of the table, which is exactly why it needs integration help.
INE (Statistics Portugal) · ine.pt
53%
German companies (20+ employees) name missing technical know-how as a top-3 AI obstacle, tied with legal uncertainty (53%) and just ahead of missing personnel (51%). Adoption more than doubled in a year — 17% to 41%.
Bitkom, Sept 2025 / 2026 study · bitkom.org

What the work costs (market rates)

$150–300/hr
Boutique AI consultancy blended rates. Mid-tier firms bill $300–500/hr, Big Four $400–800/hr. Fixed-fee AI strategy assessments run $25k–75k; PoCs $50k–250k.
AI consulting cost guide, 2026 · aidolsgroup.com · flag: vendor-published guide; corroborated by independent rate pages below
$10–30k/mo
Typical agency retainer band in the US market; freelance retainers $3–10k/month. Agency day rates $1,500–2,500.
AI consultant pricing guide, Nov 2025 · nicolalazzari.ai
>$10k/yr
More than half of US small businesses already spend over $10,000 a year on AI products and services; their top barrier is lack of in-house resources (60%), not unwillingness to spend.
Service Direct small business AI report · servicedirect.com

Evidence against us

Findings from our own research that cut against this business. They stay on the record.

66%
Of service providers say clients are becoming more demanding while less willing to pay; 33% report clients believe AI lets them bring the work in-house instead of hiring specialists.
Teamwork.com research via ITBrief, Apr 2026 · itbrief.ie
0.35%
German Mittelstand AI spending fell to 0.35% of revenue in 2025 from 0.41% — about 30% below the overall market — partly because early AI use cases failed to deliver expected gains.
Horvath survey of 200 mid-sized firms · globalbankingandfinance.com
9,000+
Pre-authenticated integrations on Zapier MCP, "set up in under 5 minutes, no code". Commodity integration plumbing is a product now, not a service. Our answer: we do not sell plumbing; we sell verified workflows and the compliance folder — read the red team page before deciding we are right.
Zapier MCP product page · zapier.com/mcp
Dec 2027
The EU AI Act high-risk compliance deadline provisionally slipped from Aug 2026 to Dec 2027/Aug 2028. There is no regulatory gun to your head. We sell compliance artifacts as engineering quality, not deadline fear — because the honest version of urgency is "uncertainty", not "panic".
Travers Smith briefing on the Digital Omnibus · traverssmith.com

Method note

These figures come from a research pass of 66 findings across six source angles, each re-fetched and verified by an independent fact-check step; 2 findings failed verification and were discarded with reasons logged. Sources were checked live on 2026-07-10. If a link above is dead when you read this, tell us and we will either replace the source or withdraw the claim — that is the deal.