I found this article in Fortune that similarly says 95% of GenAI pilots at companies fail to have a positive impact on the bottom line. They spend a lot of ink trying to sidestep the obvious explanation in favor of talking about the ways people are probably just prompting it wrong, and I couldn't be bothered to fill out the form asking MIT's group for access to the underlying report.
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
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Even to the extent that they are "prompting it wrong" it's still on the AI companies for calling this shit "AI". LLMs fundamentally do not even attempt to do cognitive work (the way a chess engine does by iterating over possible moves).
Also, LLM tools do not exist. All you can get is a sales demo for the company stock (the actual product being sold), built to impress how close to AGI the company is. You have to creatively misuse these things to get any value out of them.
The closest they get to tools is "AI coding", but even then, these things plagiarize code you don't even want plagiarized (because its MIT licensed and you'd rather keep up with upstream fixes).
Things will be better in the medium term as the surviving companies realise that workers do things and AI doesn’t. But the short term will be a bit of an arse.
Short-tem's definitely gonna be a nightmare and a half, long-term's probably gonna be better overall, but the medium term could go either way.
On the one hand, the AI bubble's burst could be enough to force CEOs and investors to see reality - they aren't gonna suffer any sort of material harm from this bubble, but seeing incontrovertible evidence that AI will make them zero money, rather than all of the money, should be enough to get them to finally fucking stop.
On the other hand, AI not only has horrendous amounts of money put behind it, but horrendous amounts of political capital - far as the CEOs and investors of the world see it, AI is their opportunity to destroy labour once and for all, and will burn the world to the ground if it means their dystopian dreams can be realised.
Medium term is going to be bad. All this AI investment is creating a kind of private equity Keynesian stimulus package. The US economy would have contracted hard the last few months without it.
Once it pops, all of Trump's worst economic policies are going to clamp down hard.