Emergn launches Praxis to curb failing AI projects

Emergn has launched Praxis, an AI-powered platform for product and portfolio decisions, alongside new research showing that many large companies rarely stop failing work.

The London-based consultancy says Praxis is designed to help organisations decide which investments should move forward and which should be paused or ended. It sits between idea-generation tools and strategic portfolio management systems, focusing on whether an opportunity has enough evidence to justify funding.

Research based on a survey of 700 senior leaders found that only 30% said stopping an underperforming programme is a normal part of how their organisation operates. Another 71% said they could not give their board a real-time view of everything currently underway.

The survey also pointed to a direct financial cost. According to the findings, large businesses risk writing off an average 2.4% of annual revenue on transformation and AI initiatives that fail to deliver the expected value. For a company with USD $1 billion in annual revenue, that would amount to about USD $24 million a year.

Investment scrutiny

The platform targets a problem that has become more pressing as AI tools reduce the time and cost of creating software. As the number of potential projects rises, executives face greater pressure to decide which ideas deserve funding and which should be abandoned before more capital is committed.

Praxis is designed to bring product evidence, investment decisions and what Emergn describes as product judgment into one system. Teams can use it to turn opportunities into assumptions and experiments, gather evidence before making major commitments, and then decide whether ideas should be funded, parked or dropped.

For senior leaders, the software is intended to provide visibility into what is being funded and the evidence behind those choices. An AI function called Stella identifies assumptions, designs and critiques experiments, assesses evidence and challenges reasoning.

Praxis has already been used and tested by product leaders ahead of its wider enterprise release. Emergn says the system draws on methods developed through more than 500 enterprise engagements with more than 320 customers over 17 years.

Method in practice

Emergn presents the release as a way to make its consulting approach last beyond client engagements. The platform embeds its Value, Flow, Quality methodology into day-to-day decisions by product teams, rather than leaving the process dependent on outside advisers.

The company cited several client examples to show how the method has been applied. At a Fortune 500 diversified financial services company, Emergn says its approach helped preserve USD $3.5 billion in value across a health and benefits platform serving 1 million users and 120 major clients.

In the energy sector, the same approach returned USD $85 million to the business by turning a USD $300 million backlog of manual and error-prone work into prioritised initiatives. In another case, Emergn says it helped a client reduce more than 100 high-value problems to 37 priorities, defer the rest and unlock GBP £10 million in cash flow.

The company also cited work with 11 researcher-led teams at Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University in Saudi Arabia, where one product grew into a USD $200 million platform.

One participant from that programme described the effect of the training in direct terms.

"Without this training, I would have built a project, not a product. Instead, I built a product that is evidence-based, customer-validated, and ready to be commercialised." - Dr. Baha, Lead Researcher, IAU Cohort 2026

Board visibility

The findings suggest the broader management issue is not just project selection but governance. If most senior leaders cannot provide a real-time account of active work to boards, companies may struggle to challenge weak initiatives early enough to avoid losses.

That concern is central to Emergn's pitch for Praxis. The company argues that while AI makes it easier to create new products and services, it does not reduce the need for discipline in investment decisions.

"AI is making it dramatically easier and cheaper to build, which makes judgment more important, not less. The question for leaders is no longer simply whether something can be built. It is whether it deserves to be built in the first place. We created Praxis to bring the product thinking we have developed with clients over 17 years into those everyday decisions, so teams can build evidence before committing capital and leaders can make investment choices with greater confidence." - Alex Adamopoulos, Chairman and CEO, Emergn