AI's Messy Middle Leaves Enterprise Adoption Stalled as Executives Demand Measurable Returns

Enterprise adoption of artificial intelligence has ground to a halt in what industry leaders call the 'messy middle'—a phase where AI costs more, changes faster, and delivers less ROI than optimists predicted. Jim VandeHei, CEO of Axios, has emerged as a prominent voice on this phenomenon, describing how even frontier capabilities in areas like code generation are insufficient to overcome deployment friction, cost structures, and organizational challenges that are paralyzing companies from using AI at meaningful scale.