The IBM Watson Health collapse (2015 launch through 2022 sale to Francisco Partners at approximately one-fifth of the initial investment) is the canonical enterprise AI failure case where the underlying technology was substantively functional and the organisational integration was not — physician rejection at named partner sites, workflow misalignment with clinical practice, and professional-identity-threat dynamics drove abandonment despite the underlying capability; the pattern reproduces at the cohort scale RAND Corporation's 2024 study (n=65 senior data scientists) identifies at the 80% AI-project failure rate, with organisational resistance dominant over technical limitation as the failure cause. The procurement-deck implication is that the change-management variable belongs in the discovery phase (AM-004) and the procurement decision (AM-140), not as a post-deployment afterthought.

Claim created at publish; review on 60-day cadence. Anchor sources: IBM Watson Health public reporting (Stat News, Wall Street Journal, IBM press releases on the 2022 sale to Francisco Partners); RAND Corporation 'The Root Causes of Failure for Artificial Intelligence Projects' RR-A2680-1 (2024, n=65); McKinsey 'The state of AI' research thread on change-management variable in deployment success; JPMorgan Chase public reporting on its 200,000-employee AI rollout and 450+ deployed use cases (Tearsheet, CIO Dive, Constellation Research). Sister claims: AM-010 (CIO playbook five operational characteristics; same JPMorgan + RAND anchors, different angle), AM-130 (four evidence classes for procurement readers; Watson as the structural-failure-mode anchor), AM-004 (discovery-phase organisational-readiness test), AM-140 (procurement-committee six pre-pilot questions including named owner accountability), AM-022 (change-management as the missing variable in deployment success). Trigger conditions to revisit before next cadence: (a) a subsequent named enterprise AI deployment failure at comparable scale where post-mortem reporting attributes failure primarily to technical limitation rather than organisational integration; (b) RAND or analogous research wave showing the failure cause distribution shifting toward technical limitation; (c) a major published methodology proposing that change-management work is properly downstream of deployment rather than upstream.