Only 30% of large enterprises ever stop a failing project, Emergn research finds — Praxis launches to fill the gap

The research, titled The Value Gap, comes from Emergn, the management and technology consultancy, and paints a stark picture of investment governance inside enterprise IT. Of the 700 senior leaders surveyed, 71 percent said they could not give their board a real-time view of everything currently underway. Just 30 percent said stopping an underperforming programme is a normal part of how their organisation operates.

The financial cost Emergn puts on that inertia: 2.4 percent of annual revenue at risk from transformation and AI initiatives that fail to deliver the value expected of them. For a company generating $1 billion a year, that is roughly $24 million in programmes that should have been stopped earlier.

Alongside the research, Emergn announced the enterprise release of Praxis, its AI-powered platform for product and portfolio decisions. The platform has been used and tested with Emergn clients for some time; this release makes it available more broadly across product organisations, with the workflows and governance tooling suited to enterprise adoption.

Praxis is designed to sit between two categories of software that enterprises already run: the strategy and roadmapping tools used early in the product lifecycle, and the portfolio management platforms used once investment decisions have been made. The gap between them, Emergn argues, is where poor investment decisions accumulate — ideas that lack evidence getting funded, and funded programmes running long past the point where stopping would have been cheaper.

The platform includes Stella, an AI capability that helps teams stress-test assumptions, design experiments and assess whether a project has the evidence to justify continued funding. Emergn's framework, Value, Flow, Quality, underpins the approach and has been refined through more than 500 enterprise engagements with over 320 customers. More than 50,000 practitioners have been trained in its methods.

Emergn points to several client outcomes as evidence that the methodology works at scale: a Fortune 500 financial services company used the approach to preserve $3.5 billion in value across a health and benefits platform. In the energy sector, the same framework returned $85 million by converting a $300 million backlog of error-prone manual work into prioritised initiatives. A third engagement unlocked £10 million in cash flow by helping a client cut 100-plus high-value problems down to 37 actionable priorities.

Praxis is available now at praxis.emergn.com. The full Value Gap research is published on Emergn's website.

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