95%
of AI pilots never make it to production.
MIT research published in 2025 found that 95% of generative AI pilot projects fail to deliver measurable business value.
About Steepworks
Don't Be Another AI Casualty.
AI is transformational technology. Most implementations fail.
Steepworks is AI infrastructure for builders, startups, and SMBs — the companies that can't afford to throw money at a failed deployment and call it learning.
The Reality
Most AI Projects Don't Survive.
The headlines celebrate a handful of winners. The numbers tell a different story — from MIT research to NTT Data's enterprise studies, the failure rate is staggering.
70–85%
of GenAI deployments miss expected outcomes.
NTT Data reports that the majority of enterprise generative AI efforts are failing — not from lack of model capability, but from infrastructure, data, and process gaps.
96%
failure rate is bankrupting AI investments.
Independent analysis of AI startup outcomes shows a near-total wipeout — the cost of treating AI as a feature instead of an infrastructure problem.
Why They Fail
It's Not the Model. It's the Foundation.
Failed AI deployments share a pattern. The model isn't the problem. The substrate beneath it is.
No Coherent Data
Company knowledge is scattered across SaaS tools, spreadsheets, and tribal memory. Agents can't reason on what they can't see.
No Process Map
Without explicit workflow context, agents guess. Guessing AI is the AI that gets shut down after the first incident.
No Activation Layer
Pilots demo well and die in production because there's no governed surface for agents to take action against the business.
No Path to Production
Every workflow becomes a one-off integration project. Cost compounds. The roadmap stalls. The budget gets cut.
Built for the SMB
AI Infrastructure for the Rest of Us.
Enterprise AI labs have data teams, ML engineers, and seven-figure budgets. The other 99% of companies don't. Steepworks is the foundation that closes that gap.
Builders
You're shipping AI-native products and need a substrate, not another framework. Reuse ingestion, governance, and activation across every customer.
Startups
You can't afford a 12-month pilot that fails. Steepworks gives you a working AI platform in weeks — owned, governed, and yours.
SMBs
Your data is in QuickBooks, HubSpot, Google Drive, and a dozen other tools. We turn that mess into a substrate agents can actually operate on.
The Steepworks Approach
A Substrate, Not a Pilot.
We build the foundation other companies skip — and that's why their projects stall.
The Failed Pattern
- Wrap an LLM around a database
- Hope it figures out your workflow
- Stateless, ungoverned, brittle
- Demos great, ships nothing
- Project gets killed in 6 months
The Steepworks Pattern
- Connect, normalize, and govern your data first
- Map your real workflows, not assumed ones
- Activate agents against governed surfaces
- Production-grade runtime from day one
- Owned by you. Audited. Compounding.
About the Founder
Joe Merrill
Joe is an experienced product builder who has taken ideas from napkins to serving millions of users, helping scale companies like Bandwidth, Dialpad, Wrike, Dataminr, and the infrastructure behind Microsoft Teams.
Don't Be a Statistic
Let's activate AI to work on your business.
Build the substrate. Skip the casualty list. Own the outcome.