Avoid the Pitfalls: How to Ensure Your AI Project Beats the Odds

At Support Partners, we’ve spent over two decades helping creative, media, and entertainment organisations navigate change. So when MIT’s latest report, “The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025”, revealed that 95% of AI investments are failing to deliver ROI, we weren’t surprised.

What did surprise us was the scale of wasted spend: an estimated $30–40 billion pouring into generative AI pilots with very little to show for it.

The problem isn’t AI itself. It’s how it’s being applied. Too many organisations chase demos and headlines instead of fixing the workflows, data, and processes that actually drive value. Our philosophy is simple: start with the work, not the widget. Look at the workflows end to end, then design AI around the reality of how your teams create, move, and monetise content.

Where AI Is Falling Short

MIT’s research highlights the same problems we see every day in studios, broadcasters, sports leagues, agencies, and in-house creative teams:

• Pilots that never scale: Teams get stuck in proof-of-concept mode. Projects look good in a slide deck but never make it into day-to-day operations.
• Misaligned investments: Sales and marketing often get most of the GenAI budget, while high-impact areas like operations, back-office automation, compliance, and content supply chains are underfunded.
• Generic tools: Horizontal AI platforms shine in demos but struggle when they hit real-world, industry-specific workflows, formats, and approvals.
• AI systems in silos: Many AI tools sit apart from your core data, systems, and teams, so they never see the full picture of your content, customers, or operations. That means you get isolated wins instead of compound value across the whole business.
• No learning loop: Many solutions don’t incorporate feedback, don’t improve over time, and don’t retain operational knowledge. They behave like experiments, not critical business systems.

The result is predictable: AI feels like a science project on the side instead of a strategic engine that makes content operations faster, smarter, and more profitable.

For most media and creative organisations, the answer isn’t a brand-new AI stack. The answer is sitting in front of you: your Microsoft estate. Azure, Entra ID, Microsoft 365, and your existing security and governance model already give you a trusted platform for identity, data, and collaboration. Even if your media workloads is on another cloud provider, the real opportunity is to treat Microsoft as your AI operating platform – unifying data, connecting workflows, and giving AI and agents a safe, governed place to run at scale.

Why Our Approach Is Different

The organisations that are seeing real, measurable ROI from AI share a handful of traits. Those traits line up closely with how we’ve built Support Partners, AIR Fusion, AIR Spaces, and our Catalyst services.

• Vertical focus, not generic tools

Our AIR Fusion content intelligence platform is built specifically for Broadcast, Media & Entertainment, Advertising, and Marketing. It understands campaigns, promos, spots, deliverables, rights, and archives – not just generic “documents” and “tasks”.

• Built on the Microsoft foundation you already own

Most of our clients are already heavily invested in Microsoft – Azure, Entra ID, Microsoft 365, and a hardened security posture. Instead of adding yet another disconnected AI stack, we turn that existing estate into your AI platform: Azure-native services for compute and storage, Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Studio for models and agents, and Microsoft 365 as the surface where work actually happens. That means faster time to value, less integration risk, and no parallel stack you have to secure and govern from scratch.

AIR Fusion and AIR Spaces are both engineered on Azure. AIR Spaces provides secure, high-performance, GPU-enabled virtual worksations and resources; AIR Fusion brings the content intelligence, automation, and workflow logic that sits on top. Together, they don’t just plug into Microsoft – they turn your Microsoft platform into an AI-ready operating layer for creative work.

• Last-mile execution, not just platforms

We don’t just ship a tool and walk away. Through our Catalyst services, we work alongside your teams to map workflows, design use cases, refine prompts and outputs, and embed AI into the actual day-to-day tasks of editors, producers, marketers, and operations. It’s this last mile that turns AI from “interesting” into indispensable.

• Seamless integration into the tools you already use

AI only delivers ROI if it sits where people actually work. We focus on integrations across editing tools, asset management systems, storage, collaboration platforms, scheduling, and analytics. That means less copy-and-paste, fewer manual hops, and more automated, measurable flow from idea to delivery.

• Clear, outcome-based metrics

From the outset, we define what success looks like: fewer manual steps, faster turnaround, reduced rework, improved asset reuse, lower cost per deliverable, or higher output with the same headcount. Then we build dashboards and reporting around those metrics so you can prove value and justify scaling.

Generic AI tools don’t understand your workflows, your content structures, or your approval chains. Tailored, domain-specific AI – built on the platform you already trust – has a far better chance of paying for itself quickly.

Your Roadmap to Real ROI

If you’re serious about moving from experimentation to transformation, here’s a practical starting point we use with clients:

• Establish an AI steering group that spans creative, operations, IT, and finance so goals, risks, and success metrics are aligned.
• Identify 3–5 high-value use cases that are close to revenue or cost: promo versioning, rights-aware reuse, compliance checks, localisation, write-once-publish-many workflows, automated logging, or archive search.
• Understand and structure your data: Audit where your content, metadata, rights, logs, and analytics live, standardise schemas and permissions, and expose them securely so AI and agents can query, reason, and act on trusted data instead of working blind.
• Define success in hard numbers: hours saved, cycle time reduced, errors avoided, additional output gained, or new revenue enabled.
• Map your existing data and content systems so AI runs where your identity, security, and governance already live, we suggest using Microsoft, Entra ID for access control, and Microsoft 365 as the day-to-day surface where users interact with AI and agents.
• Prioritise integration over experimentation: focus on getting one workflow deeply integrated and measured rather than running a dozen disconnected pilots.
• Partner with specialists who understand both your industry and the Microsoft platform, and who can design secure, scalable solutions that actually move the financial needle.

How Support Partners Can Help

At Support Partners, we don’t believe in one-size-fits-all AI. Our AIR Fusion content intelligence platform and AIR Spaces virtual desktop solution, combined with our Catalyst professional services, are designed to meet the specific needs of creative and media operations on Microsoft Azure.

We bring three things to the table: deep domain expertise in content and creative workflows, a deep understanding of the modern Azure-native platform stack, and a relentless focus on measurable outcomes – not just interesting demos.

If you’re looking to cut through the AI noise and turn your existing Microsoft investment into a real competitive advantage, we’d be happy to talk. Visit www.support-partners.com to learn more about AIR Fusion, AIR Spaces, and Catalyst, and how we can help your next AI project beat the odds.