Friction isn’t failure. It’s what keeps your tires on the road, what makes a live experience memorable, and, according to MIT, what separates the 5% of GenAI pilots that succeed from the 95% that don’t.

A new MIT study, State of AI in Business 2025, reveals that billions of dollars invested in enterprise GenAI pilots are yielding no results. But the lesson isn’t that GenAI is broken. It’s that companies are trying to erase the very drag that creates value.

MIT calls it the GenAI Divide.

The data is stark: Only 5% of custom GenAI tools survive the pilot-to-production cliff, while generic chatbots hit 83% adoption for trivial tasks but stall the moment workflows demand context and customization.

I’ve long argued that humans need friction to stay human. Resistance is what gives life meaning, effort, constraint, the drag that makes judgment and authorship possible.

The MIT report shows the same law applies to GenAI. Without friction, GenAI is theater. Smooth demos impress, but without governance, memory, and workflow redesign, they deliver no value. The companies that succeed are those that engineer for friction, calibrating it rather than eliminating it.

By friction, I don’t mean inefficiency for its own sake. I mean the resistance that forces adaptation. In physics, friction is what prevents your car from spinning out of control.

In business, GenAI friction is the constraint that drives evolution: new protocols, conflicting incentives, the uncomfortable need to redesign workflows instead of layering another tool on top.

MIT’s data proves the point: pilots that glide frictionless from demo to deployment never build the muscle to........

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