CORRECTION: the viral "60-70% (or 60-80%) of dashboards go unused (Gartner)" stat cannot be traced to any named Gartner report — vendor folklore

Correction: The single most-repeated dashboard statistic — "60-70% of dashboards go unused," attributed to "Gartner research" and a "dashboard graveyard" — could not be traced to any named Gartner report, analyst, year, or document ID. It traces to vendor blogs (one of which footnotes it to an October 2025 LinkedIn post), and the figure mutates across sources — Fusedash.ai, for instance, states "Between 60 and 80 percent of business intelligence dashboards go unused" — the signature of an unsourced, range-shifting viral statistic.

Source: Trace of citation chains; Fusedash.ai blog (mutates the figure).

Confidence: Verified — the absence of a primary source is reproducible.

Why this matters for Candid: Do not cite this stat. The defensible version of the abandonment story is the low, flat adoption data (BARC / Eckerson Group (March 2022, 214 D&A leaders surveyed Nov-Dec 2021) — BI/analytics adoption at 25% of employees on average; "stuck around 20% for many years" per Eckerson + Gartner — "pervasive business intelligence remains elusive, with BI and analytics adoption at about 30% of all employees" (doc 3753469, Howson & Sallam)) plus practitioner accounts of "dashboard rot." Same pattern as CORRECTION: the viral "42% abandon portals out of frustration / 43% prefer email" stat is misattributed — the 42% traces to Namogoo e-commerce cart-abandonment research, not portal logins and The "2× engagement / conversion" interactive-content stat is widely (mis)attributed to "Content Marketing Institute" — no original CMI dataset producing it exists — vendor folklore mutates as it spreads.