Mike Dodds' article "What Works (and Doesn't) Selling Formal Methods" offers some insight - two points were: (i) many potential applications of formal methods in business do not result in an attractive cost-benefit outcome, relative to mainstream software development approaches, especially in being able to produce enough benefit for a small input of time / resources. (ii) anecdote: one business that needs to produce software that complies with certain validation/quality targets - say achieved with a baseline method using a lot of manual QA and without formal methods - does not get a business benefit to investing in increased validation, they just need enough enough validation to clear the compliance bar or rank slightly ahead of the competition. if formal methods could assist them in achieving the same level of validation to meet their compliance obligations with less cost than their baseline development and QA processes then they might have much more appetite to invest in formal methods.

https://www.galois.com/articles/what-works-and-doesnt-sellin...

corresponding HN thread from earlier this week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44131324