Beating the 4%: Why AI Fails—and How Enterprise Leaders Can Defy the Odds
Over 80% of enterprise AI initiatives fail to move beyond pilots, and only a rare 4% deliver meaningful ROI. This provocative panel confronts the hard truth behind AI project failures: misaligned goals, siloed teams, poor data quality, and a lack of governance and scalable infrastructure.
But there is a path forward. Panelists will share firsthand how they’ve broken through the AI failure cycle by aligning AI with business outcomes, building agentic architectures, and embedding adaptive governance. Attendees will leave with actionable insights on how to move from stalled pilots to scalable impact—and join the few who are beating the odds.
Andy Brown currently serves as CEO of Sand Hill East, LLC, which provides strategic management, advice and marketing services to emerging companies. Mr. Brown is also a member of the boards of directors of Guidewire inc. a public traded company in the PNC insurance business, Zscaler, Inc., a publicly traded company providing cloud security services, Pure Storage, Inc., a publicly traded software-defined data storage solutions company, Digital Asset, a company providing solutions in the DeFi and Digital Ledger workflow world, Moogsoft, a next generation AI-Operations company, Skyhive, a company providing Digital Reskilling & Education.
He is also CEO and co-owner of Biz Tectonics LLC, a privately held consulting company. From September 2010 to October 2013, Mr. Brown served as Group Chief Technology Officer of UBS, an investment bank. Prior to that, Mr. Brown served in a variety of executive management and leadership roles at a variety of leading banking companies including Bank of America, Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse. Mr. Brown holds a BSc Honors Degree in Chemical Physics from University College London.
Phil Tee is the EVP & Head of AI Innovations at Zscaler and the former CEO and co-founder of Moogsoft, the pioneer and leading provider of artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps). Phil is a serial entrepreneur, inventor, and expert in IT service assurance — a category he was instrumental in shaping through his invention of Netcool (acquired by IBM) nearly 25 years ago. Within 5 years of graduating from Sussex, he co-founded Omnibus Transport Technologies Limited (OTT) to build and market Netcool/Omnibus. Since then, Phil has led numerous companies to successful exits, including RiverSoft (IPO) and Njini (acquired by Riverbed).
More recently at Moogsoft that he co-founded in 2011, he invented the technology that supports over 200 customers worldwide, including SAP, American Airlines, Yahoo!, Verizon, Outsystems, BNYM and HCL Technologies. Moogsoft has 72 patents and more than two dozen peer reviewed publications covering the technology, many of them authored or co-authored by Phil. Phil holds a PhD in Informatics and is also a Royal Society Entrepreneur in Residence.
Sean is the Associate Vice President of Cloud and Infrastructure Technology at Merck and Co., Inc. He has more than 20+ years of experience in the technology industry spanning infrastructure, cyber security, and cloud. Sean is currently responsible for leading Merck’s overall cloud strategy and implementation of foundational technologies and services to enable cloud adoption. Merck is currently undertaking a comprehensive IT Transformation program, leveraging cloud migrations as a catalyst to drive significant operating model and ways of working changes into the organization. Prior to this role, Sean has also worked at REAN Cloud, a Virginia-based technology startup, as their Executive Director where he was responsible for leading the Enterprise Health & Life Sciences business along with driving company-wide Information Security, Compliance, and Quality initiatives. Sean is recognized within the industry for introducing disruptive, cutting-edge cloud thinking into the highly regulated Life Sciences and computing landscape. Sean has previously served as a member of the AWS customer advisory board and was a core member of the AWS GxP working group.
