95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

Here is the report: https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Bus...

The story there is very different than what's in the article.

Some infos:

- 50% of the budgets (the one that fails) went to marketing and sales

- the authors still see that AI would offer automation equaling $2.3 trillion in labor value affecting 39 million positions

- top barriers for failure is Unwillingness to adopt new tools, Lack of executive sponsorship

Lots of people here are jumping to conclusions. AI does not work. I don't think that's what the report says.

That's my assessment of the report as well.... really, some news truly is "fake" where they are pushing a narrative that they think will drive clicks and eyeballs, and the media is severely misrepresenting what is in this report.

The failure is not AI, but that a lot of existing employees are not adopting the tools or at least not adopting the tools provided by their company. The "Shadow AI economy" they discuss is a real issue: People are just using their personal subscriptions to LLMs rather than internal company offerings. My university made an enterprise version of ChatGPT available to all students, faculty, and staff so that it can be used with data that should not be used with cloud-based LLMs, but it lacks a lot of features and has many limitations compared to, for example, GPT-5. So, adoption and retention of users of that system is relatively low, which is almost surely due to its limitations compared to cloud-based options. Most use-cases don't necessarily involve data that would be illegal to use with a cloud-based system.