Your AI doesn't know your company. That is the real reason most of it stalls before production, and it has almost nothing to do with the model.
An AI tool knows your company when it can answer using your definitions, your rules, and the institutional knowledge that makes your business specific. Most tools can't. They guess, confidently, from whatever they can infer from a prompt and a few rows of data. A guess that sounds right is still a guess.
The model was never your bottleneck
Everyone is shopping for a better model. The companies whose AI actually works this year will not be the ones with the best model. They will be the ones whose company is written down somewhere the model can read.
MIT studied this in 2025. Across 300 enterprise AI deployments, 95% delivered no measurable return. Their own conclusion was not that the models were weak. It was that the tools never learned how the business actually works.
That should change where you spend your attention. A smarter model is a more confident guesser, not a more correct one.
Your company isn't written down anywhere AI can read it
Here is the uncomfortable part. The reason your AI guesses is that your company mostly exists in people's heads and in tools that don't agree with each other. It was never written down in a form a machine can use.
That one gap shows up in four ways. You will recognize all of them.
1. Every tool invents its own definition of your business
Ask ChatGPT, Cursor, and your support bot what "active customer" means at your company. You will get three different answers. Nobody decided this. Each tool guessed, and they guessed differently. So nobody trusts any of the outputs, and nothing ships.
2. The rules that run the business aren't written down
Why that account gets the discount. How a renewal actually gets approved. Which customers are politically sensitive and why. This is the knowledge that makes the company run, and it lives in DMs, in ex-employees' heads, and in Slack threads from two years ago. No model can infer it, and no model can reach it.
3. You teach every new tool from scratch
Six weeks getting ChatGPT to understand the business. Then Cursor needs the same. Then the support agent. Then Glean. Every tool starts at zero, and the explanations drift apart over time until no two agree. Your data team becomes the integration layer, by hand.
