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    <title>The TrustEdge Podcast</title>
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    <description>Conversations with AI leaders in healthcare, legal, and financial services. Practical insights for trust-critical industries.</description>
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      <title>Why Most Enterprise AI Projects Fail — And What to Do Instead</title>
      <description><![CDATA[Seventy-three percent of enterprise AI projects fail — and most failures are organizational, not technical. Erik D. Jones, CEO of Jacobian Engineering and TrustEdge founder, explains the three things most organizations skip when adopting AI and how to fix them.]]></description>
      <content:encoded><![CDATA[Seventy-three percent of enterprise AI projects fail to deliver ROI. The model usually works. The data is often there. The engineering team delivers. The project fails anyway — because the organization did not know how to use AI.

In this episode, Erik D. Jones, CEO of Jacobian Engineering and founder of TrustEdge, breaks down what "using AI well" actually requires — and why most organizations skip the steps that matter most.

Erik opens with the gap that kills most AI initiatives before they reach scale: AI literacy. Not technical literacy — strategic literacy. Leaders who cannot articulate what problem they are solving. Operational staff who either distrust AI tools and work around them, or over-trust them and treat AI output as authoritative without developing the judgment to verify it. Both failure modes are fixable, but they require deliberate investment in training at every level, not just in IT.

The second leg is automation designed around workflows that are actually understood. Erik's clearest wins come from high-volume, document-heavy processes — intake forms, contract review, invoice processing — where the work is well-defined and the productivity impact is measurable. A professional services firm went from four hours per client intake to forty minutes. A legal team cut contract review time by sixty percent, with lawyers spending their time on the twenty percent of agreements that actually needed judgment. The pattern behind both: the workflow was mapped before the automation was designed. The failure pattern is the inverse — organizations that automate before they understand the work, and end up with systems that handle seventy percent of cases well and thirty percent worse than a human would.

The third leg is operationalization with governance: knowing what your AI is doing, being able to explain its outputs, and having mechanisms to catch and correct errors. For organizations in trust-critical industries, compliance requirements sharpen that obligation. For everyone else, it is still the difference between a deployment that can sustain and one that quietly drifts.

**About the guest**

Erik D. Jones is the CEO of Jacobian Engineering and the founder of TrustEdge, Jacobian's AI division. He holds a degree in Electrical Engineering from UC Davis and began his career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he worked on national security and defense systems. He founded Jacobian Engineering in October 2005. With 30+ years building technology programs for organizations across healthcare, commercial, government, and non-profit sectors, Erik holds certifications including ISC² CISSP, AWS Security Specialist, AWS Solutions Architect Professional, AWS Certified AI Practitioner, and CCSFP. At TrustEdge, he leads AI strategy and oversees every engagement.

## Chapters

- 0:00 — Cold open: organizational failure, not technical failure
- 1:18 — Erik's background: Lawrence Livermore to Jacobian
- 4:30 — How TrustEdge came out of Jacobian's work
- 7:00 — The AI literacy gap: what leadership actually needs to know
- 10:30 — Teaching people to use AI as an accelerant, not a replacement
- 13:30 — Where AI automation actually delivers: document-heavy workflows
- 17:00 — Why automation fails: skipping the workflow analysis step
- 19:30 — Governance, compliance, and the BAA story
- 21:30 — Rapid fire: leadership gaps, surprises, and the hard part
- 24:00 — Closing takeaways

## Closing

If you are trying to figure out how to use AI well in your organization — where to start, how to evaluate vendors, how to build the internal capability to sustain this — reach out. Let's talk about your AI strategy. Find us at trustedge.ai or call (415) 644-8208.

Follow the show in your podcast app to catch every episode.]]></content:encoded>
      <pubDate>Sun, 26 Apr 2026 18:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
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