Breaking through the 95%: how Capco's AI Labs turn AI promise into performance

Peter Agorioge
30 October 2025

A recent MIT report revealed a striking fact: 95% of generative AI pilots fail. Despite rapid advances in GenAI, most initiatives stall before they reach production. Not because the technology doesn’t work - but because the approach doesn’t.

At Capco, we’ve seen that pattern repeat across the industry. AI rarely fails due to the models themselves; it fails when organizations try to bolt new technology onto old ways of working. That’s why we created Capco’s AI Labs - to rapidly prototype and validate AI approaches, helping clients de-risk implementation in their own operational environments, where governance and integration can take longer.

Our aim is simple: turn AI’s potential into measurable performance.

Building AI that works in practice

Capco’s AI Labs bring together data scientists, engineers, and financial services specialists to co-create and test solutions that solve real business pain points.

We work with a “fail fast, learn faster” culture - experimenting with multiple models and techniques, benchmarking each for robustness, scalability, bias, accuracy and repeatability. This helps us identify the best-fit solution before it ever reaches a client delivery team.

It’s an approach that de-risks projects from the start. By the time a solution moves into implementation, we’ve already proven that it performs - technically, operationally, and within regulatory guardrails.

Case study: Compliance Assist

When one client’s compliance team faced an urgent deadline to review their entire policy document library, they asked: “Can GenAI help us do this faster?”

Rather than applying a generic tool, our AI Labs partnered with Capco’s regulatory and risk SMEs to map the full compliance review journey. Operating within a flexible, pre-approved environment meant we could test and iterate at a pace that would have been difficult for the client to achieve under their own governance constraints - delivering equivalent insights around four times faster than an equivalent full-fledged solution built in their own environment.

The result was a tailored GenAI solution that delivered faster, more consistent assessments and provided clear remediation recommendations while maintaining full regulatory rigor. We were able to highlight benefits of:

80% reduction in work effort for identifying in scope regulations
70% reduction in work effort for assessing regulatory alignment to policies
80% reduction in work effort for horizon scanning
50% reduction in work effort for assessing policy to control and customer alignment

That initial proof of concept became the foundation for our Compliance and Controls Smart Suite, which now applies the same AI techniques across broader compliance and risk functions.

Why Capco’s approach works

The difference between a failed pilot and a successful deployment often comes down to collaboration. Capco’s AI Labs bring together data scientists, engineers, and domain specialists - from financial services and compliance to operating model and transformation - to co-create and test solutions that solve real business pain points.

We focus on the right use cases, tangible prototypes, and measurable ROI - building accelerators that are not only innovative, but practical and repeatable.

Generative AI has huge potential, but real impact only comes when it’s applied with purpose, precision and an understanding of how businesses actually operate. That’s what Capco’s AI Labs deliver.

What’s next

This post kicks off our AI Labs blog series, where we’ll share what’s working (and what’s not) as we apply GenAI to real financial services challenges.

Because for us, AI success isn’t theoretical - it’s tested, measured and built for the real world.