Research from Practical AI Institute
We publish what we can measure and attribute, state the method, and name the limitation. A research asset nobody can check is not worth publishing.
Research from Practical AI Institute
We publish what we can measure and attribute. The first study in this series, the Trapped Capital Index, assembles the published evidence on what AI adoption costs and returns for companies doing $10M to $50M, and states its method and its limitations.
Our position is that a research asset is only worth publishing if someone else can check it. Where a figure comes from a third party, they are named beside it. Where a figure is our own arithmetic, it is presented as arithmetic.
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The Trapped Capital Index, version 2026.1, covers pricing across the AI consulting market, the annual cost of leaving a workflow manual, and a ranking of what actually moves citation in AI answers, drawn from four published measurement programmes.
It is labelled a synthesis rather than a survey, and it explains why.
How to use this work
Practitioners can take the costing framework and apply it to their own operations. Journalists and researchers can quote the findings, which are written as complete sentences, and can request the underlying working. Anyone evaluating suppliers can use the published pricing ranges as a benchmark, which is the reason we published them.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Who can use Practical AI Institute research?
- Anyone, with attribution. Findings are written as complete sentences specifically so they can be quoted, the method and limitations are stated on the page, and the source for every third-party figure is named beside it. Journalists and researchers can request our working directly.
- Does Practical AI Institute publish primary survey data?
- Not yet. The first study is a synthesis of published third-party measurements combined with our own costing framework, and it says so. If a primary survey is fielded later it will carry its own method statement, and the existing page will note the change rather than being silently updated.