A few weeks ago, I set out on what I thought would be a straightforward reporting journey.
After years of momentum for AI—even if you didn’t think it would be good for the world, you probably thought it was powerful enough to take seriously—hype for the technology had been slightly punctured. First there was the underwhelming release of GPT-5 in August. Then a report released two weeks later found that 95% of generative AI pilots were failing, which caused a brief stock market panic. I wanted to know: Which companies are spooked enough to scale back their AI spending?
I searched and searched for them. As I did, more news fueled the idea of an AI bubble that, if popped, would spell doom economy-wide. Stories spread about the circular nature of AI spending, layoffs, the inability of companies to articulate what exactly AI will do for them. Even the smartest people building modern AI systems were saying the tech has not progressed as much as its evangelists promised.
But after all my searching, companies that took these developments as a sign to perhaps not go all in on AI were nowhere to be found. Or, at least, none that were willing to admit it. What gives?
There are several interpretations of this one reporter’s quest (which, for the record, I’m presenting as an anecdote and not a representation of the economy), but let’s start with the easy ones. First is that this is a huge score for the “AI is a bubble” believers. What is a bubble if not a situation where companies continue to spend relentlessly even in the face of worrying news? The other is that underneath the bad headlines, there’s not enough genuinely troubling news about AI to convince companies they should pivot.
But it could also be that the unbelievable speed of AI progress and adoption has made me think industries are more sensitive to news than they perhaps should be. I spoke with Martha Gimbel, who leads the Yale Budget Lab and coauthored a report finding that AI has not yet changed anyone’s jobs. What I gathered is that Gimbel, like many economists, thinks on a longer time scale than anyone in the AI world is used to.
“It would be historically shocking if a technology had had an impact as quickly as people thought that this one was going to,” she says. In other words, perhaps most of the economy is still figuring out what the hell AI even does, not deciding whether to abandon it.
The other reaction I heard—particularly from the consultant crowd—is that when executives hear that so many AI pilots are failing, they indeed take it very seriously. They’re just not reading it as a failure of the technology itself. They instead point to pilots not moving quickly enough, companies lacking the right data to build better AI, or a host of other strategic reasons.
Even if there is incredible pressure, especially on public companies, to invest heavily in AI, a few have taken big swings on the technology only to pull back. The buy now, pay later company Klarna laid off staff and paused hiring in 2024, claiming it could use AI instead. Less than a year later it was hiring again, explaining that “AI gives us speed. Talent gives us empathy.”
Drive-throughs, from McDonald’s to Taco Bell, ended pilots testing the use of AI voice assistants. The vast majority of Coca-Cola advertisements, according to experts I spoke with, are not made with generative AI, despite the company’s $1 billion promise.
So for now, the question remains unanswered: Are there companies out there rethinking how much their bets on AI will pay off, or when? And if there are, what’s keeping them from talking out loud about it? (If you’re out there, email me!)