AI's ceiling is the few extra benchmark points every new model squeezes out. A slightly better score on MMLU or GSM8K. A cleverer chain-of-thought or the latest MCP. A shiny new reasoning mode that feels almost human.
BI's ceiling is "talk to your data", "agentic analytics", "insights that write themselves", "your dashboard replaced by a chat window".
But the floor is where most of us actually live.
AI's floor is the stubborn hallucination rate still holding back production use. The opaque model updates that break your workflow overnight. The memory limits that forget context halfway through a task. The cost per token that quietly adds up before value is proven.
BI's floor is old, simple, but very real:
- System stability
- Support quality
- Write-back or override
- Cell-level calculation and commentary
- Pixel-perfect paginated reports
- Version control
And I mean enterprise-grade features, not something vibe-coded by Tam over the weekend. Some of these were solved in the past, by legacy vendors who are now struggling in the new world, and honestly no single product has covered all the bases so far.
The ceiling attracts the headlines and Wall Street's money. It probably will change how millions of self-employed people and small businesses operate.
But in enterprise land, where the bulk of business value still hides, I guess it's not the ceiling that matters right now in 2025. It's the floor that needs raising.
Less than 5% of knowledge workers care about ceiling-level innovation. Maybe 2% turn it into personal productivity. And let's be honest, most ceiling features are not stable enough for large-scale production use. I have more than once tried to present some AI-generated "wisdom" to real people with real wisdom, and most of it is either something they already knew, or not that helpful because the knowledge fed into the AI is not what really happens in the marketplace.
Meanwhile, most people are just trying to get simple, reliable things done. An untold number of hours are still spent in Excel spreadsheets.
AI-assisted development means we could build stronger floors faster than ever. Yet most companies still wobble, spending too many hours to produce a board-ready report while the AI hype has everyone staring up, hoping the ceiling will somehow lift the floor (or get rid of it altogether?).
If we can lift the number of people actually using AI and BI, not for fancy stuff but through the sturdy, everyday "floor" features, from a few percent to even a few dozen, we'd unlock more business value than any new model benchmark or analytics buzzword could deliver. I can bet a few bottles of good wine on this.
Am I asking too many questions? Or asking too much?
First posted on LinkedIn. This is the canonical copy, lightly tidied.