AI hype meets reality as majority of CEOs report no financial returns

https://www.techspot.com/news/110983-ai-hype-meets-reality-majority-ceos-report-no.html

43 Comments

  1. My one genuine use case is that even with troubleshooting time allowed, I think using AI to write scripts tends to be faster than doing it on my own from scratch.

    Anything else at work feels like me going out of my way trying to find use cases to justify management demands to brag about being an “AI-forward” company.

  2. Article title doesn’t say that corporate CEOs don’t expect an ROI for AI in just 6 months

  3. its a solution in desperate search of a problem

    people have treated it as a toy, but won’t pay for it

  4. I will argue there’s a non tangible value to AI. Being able to transcribe meetings and get summaries means I can get back to doing three other people’s work faster

  5. When these stocks come crashing down to earth, I wonder whether they’ll try to paint a narrative of “ugh it’s the general economy and tariffs that did this to us!”, and not the fact that they’re selling rainbows and unicorn farts

  6. Catchphrase1997 on

    They’d only ever see ROI if they started replacing jobs en masse, but the technology isn’t there yet and the free market wouldn’t promote it unless services and products become substantially cheaper in the process

  7. In a meeting just now, a manager said we’re going to have to have several projects using AI, with the reason being “Because you wouldn’t now play Wimbledon with wooden rackets.” Okay, but tennis used newer tech racquets because there was actual proof it improved the game. Where is the proof that AI provides real world benefits? Right here CEOS show no benefits.

    Wimbledon also requires wearing all white and playing on clay. Does that mean we’re going to work outdoors, on clay, and wear white? And if it rains we get to stop working?

  8. Yeah no shit. There are some great use cases for it, but you can’t just expect to throw it into everything and expect great results for cheaper than competent people. LLMs hallucinate and make tons of mistakes, so you’re spending the same amount of time delivering something, except more time is spent fixing and verifying what the AI spat out vs just doing it yourself. Except now you have to pay for expensive AI subscriptions which means you can’t hire more competent employees.

  9. Company says use AI, but don’t put any company info into it. WTF am I supposed to do with it? I just argue with it, telling ChatGPT that I heard Claude was talking shit about it and asking what it’s going to do about it.

  10. The problem is that it’s overused. It can give some benefits in specific scenarios, but everyone is trying to achieve magic with it, and it’s just not there.

  11. They still can’t quite figure out how to monetize something almost nobody on the ground wants.

  12. It can be useful as a tool. Can be. However, it has been overhyped to the extreme as a silver bullet for every single issue facing corporate America, and it’s just not. It’s a solution desperate for a problem.

  13. AmateurExpert__ on

    To the surprise of absolutely no one with a functioning brain, and who wasn’t running a pump-and-dump techbro scam

  14. We are confusing ‘saving time’ with ‘generating value.’

    If AI helps an employee write a generic email in 10 seconds instead of 10 minutes, that looks like an efficiency gain on paper. But if that generic email doesn’t close the deal, the financial ROI is exactly zero.

    We’ve spent 18 months giving everyone a Ferrari engine (GenAI), but we haven’t built the roads (workflows) yet. Until companies change how they work, rather than just speeding up bad processes, the ROI will stay flat

  15. I wouldn’t celebrate quite yet.

    AI is still in its growth phase and enshittification isn’t yet fully come in play. They have started increasing the cost of using copilot just for about 6 months I believe.

    They want customers to get hooked first, then reel in the profits.

  16. Cool. The town hall I attended last week from the Fortune 500 company I work for hasn’t received that news yet. They’re going all in on AI. Acquired some small AI shop, forcing us to use Copilot at any possible opportunity, and realigning our whole business to integrate with AI.

    On a possibly related note, last year, we had a Black Friday where huge swaths of great personnel were unceremoniously fired. My own group lost 30% of our team. Senior level SMEs. AMs. PMs. Leads. Poof.

  17. Its funny how we’ve been conditioned that AI will be everywhere and we must accept that AI can be wrong and/or hallucinate.

    Imagine 20 years ago when you call up tech support and they tell you upfront that the guy on the other end is a stoner who sometimes will give you wrong answers.

  18. >For many organizations, AI is still stuck in pilot projects, isolated tools, or productivity experiments rather than something that reshapes decision-making or operating models.

    Must be nice! My company is preferring the “lay off 30% of the workforce, and then move up deadlines and demand you meet them with AI that doesn’t work” approach.

  19. Lol unless they are hiding a vastly superior AI, this shit is nothing groundbreaking. It’s like Google with extra steps. They acted like these were super intelligent AI that was going to replace millions of worker and that saved payroll was going to be profit.

  20. razorwiregoatlick877 on

    AI over promised. I’ve been a software developer for over 20 years and I find the tools I use incredibly helpful. It’s not going to replace a companies workforce though. It just makes my work faster.

  21. If AI can do your job it can DEFINITELY do what a CEO does for way less if we’re truly cutting unnecessary costs…

  22. FudgeAllOfYous on

    Duh.. we needed a new dishwasher and turns out..we actually did not need one with AI features. No matter how hard the store site tried to convince us before selecting a model with the same features we used the last 20yrs….the feature to wash our dishes.

  23. You mean to tell me chat bots that people beat off to are not the next panacea in human development?!?!? But the man with the billions in venture capital buying articles and holding major marketing campaigns disguised as “conferences” told me that AI can spin straw into gold! Surly this has to be some kind of mistake. (/s for the oblivious)

  24. Poor CEOs can only expect the slice of the pie if it ever materializes it all. If they ever do see a return on investment then AI companies will quickly raise their prices. And then the data centers will raise the prices the AI companies have to pay.

  25. Author_A_McGrath on

    If only a huge number of us had predicted this.

    …and… you know… they’d listened.

  26. Good. We need force this AI slop bullshit out and burst the damn bubble. Fuck these tech billionaires, I want to see them fail.

  27. Waste_Positive2399 on

    I think shareholders (especially institutional investors) are just as clueless about Ai, and technology in general, as CEOs. Otherwise they would have nipped this in the bud.

    All they ever heard was “use Ai for everything, reduce the workforce, make boatloads of money”.

  28. BREAKING NEWS: CEOs who invested all their assets in shit-rolling pits surprised that no one wants to roll around in shit.

  29. adorkablegiant on

    I’ve been learning French for the past few months and I feel like this is the perfect opportunity for me to say something to these CEOs in French:

    You fucking morons.

  30. TrainingJellyfish643 on

    No shit, thats why theyve been circlejerking each other by passing around the same money as if that means theyre worth anything

    Wall Street is full of absolute fucking regards