Building an enterprise AI benchmark changed how I evaluate AI

The article argues that enterprise AI success depends less on model sophistication and more on the surrounding “harness” — retrieval, permissions, identity, integrations, and current context across business systems. For CIOs, the strategic implication is that AI initiatives will fail or become expensive if IT treats them as isolated model-buying decisions rather than as enterprise architecture programs focused on trusted data access and workflow connectivity. The business impact is clear: better context plumbing drives higher accuracy, lower token costs, and safer answers for customer-facing and operational use cases.