How important is profit for software projects?

I have just posted on LinkedIn, “Does AI actually impact the bottom line in a good way?”. I look at an article from the Register based on a Gartner report which reports that in their survey AI projects “sucess rates were “only 28 percent of use cases fully succeed and offer return on investment (ROI).”

I look at at arguments from Perez’s Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital and remember a late 20th century paradox that while many IS projects had poor and even negative ROIs, firms that didn’t invest failed.