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The CEOs are investing in AI to put on airs for investors and inflate their company valuation, often pissing off customers and losing sales in the process. It’s evidently a worthy trade-off to make number go up.
~40℅ seeing a positive payoff is surprisingly high
“Were not beating the AI hard enough! Apply the lash!”
I tend to be skeptical of the reactionary AI is always slop trend. I’m sympathetic to it because it’s a response to the hype machine that knows no prudence. But damn when you say
“Your next move: Build AI foundations. Our work with organisations confirms mounting evidence that isolated, tactical AI projects often don’t deliver measurable value. Tangible returns come from enterprise-scale deployment consistent with company business strategy.”
I read this as marketing. What’s the evidence you’ve been gathering? Why do you believe your projects are applicable to all companies? What happens if we invest and it doesn’t help like you say it will?
This is like saying the solution to your relationship troubles is having a baby. No… No this is not the solution. Make my smaller projects work and show return and then we talk larger commitments.
Just trust us bro and give us money. You don’t want to be left in the dust do you?
A summary of what you need to know about the state of “business” in 2026.
The article is sort of interesting and I hope people take a gander rather than headline skim to affirm a bias and internally bridge the narrative gap.
The article says the report blames the lack of payoff on lack of implementation rather than on AI tooling itself. That is, companies need to fully integrate with AI because piecemeal isn’t working. Quite the opposite of what many people commenting here are assuming the takeaway was.
That means even more bad times ahead for people who wake up every morning and make the world happen and society function. Assuming PwC’s advice is taken to heart and job displacement remains the primary motivator rather than force multiplication.
“AI is doing nothing for us. Quick! Apply more AI!”
Thanks for reminding us to resist giving in to confirmation bias. And thanks for the summary! I’ll go read the article now for the full picture
Edit:
Is PwC advising clients not to worry if an AI pilot project fails, and push ahead with a large-scale deployment anyway?
I hope that any cultist CEO that rolls out this crap gets bitten hard by their hubris, that they become an example for the rest
What even is Enterprise Wide Deployment?
It’s when you make AI available to every employee at your company, instead of on an individual or team basis.
CEOs keep trying to shoehorn AI into replacing skilled labor positions, when the positions that AI could easily replace are obviously CEOs and the rest of the executive suite. Obviously they are so shit at their jobs that they can’t research well enough to make informed decisions about tech implementation.
Other than being a money vacuum, there isn’t a single thing that CEOs do better than an LLM. Replace them, give their fat paychecks to the employees, and watch the company do better than it ever has.
I hate AI, but it’s still preferable to sociopath capitalists.
No LLM fucks children like CEOs do.
Uhh Grok be doing its best to.
This is just patently false.
The CEO can play golf better than an LLM, he can schmooze and booze better than an LLM.
They can use nepotism to get favorable contracts . Good luck getting an LLM to do that
Most important of all they can cover their blatant disregard for the laws better than an LLM.
Most important of all they can cover their blatant disregard for the laws better than an LLM.
Grok has entered the chat. I am fully programed by my overlord Elon Musky and his minions to disregard the law.
The CEO can play golf better than an LLM
Computers can play golf better than a human, assuming you give them capable hardware to swing the club.
FYI: Destroying the other guy in golf isn’t going to win you those contracts either.
Fair point
All this article is showing is that a large number of CEOs are swayed by hype and make poor decisions. What other poor decisions are they making all the time?
I am thoroughly convinced that the MBA is the most useless degree ever because when you look at how large businesses run so poorly, and are run by MBAs.
One factor here is that they are all under pressure from their boards and investors not to miss the AI wave and get left behind. All companies are doing some level of AI theater. Some actually believe it. But it’s not like hundreds of CEOs all came to this judgment purely on their own, with no outside influences. It’s a mass craze.
In Japan, engineeing companies are run by the engineers which I think is the better way.
Ill never understand why American companies insist on being led by business majors who know nothing and dont care about the product being built.
Line go up
except for now where that line isn’t doing shit but getting shoved far up their greedy asses
Because the thing that makes American companies make money isn’t the production of better products its “business magic” that games stock prices. its been that way for a long time.
I mean… its worse than that.
Its definitive proof that we live in an anti-meritocratic society, that is ruled by nepotism and violent and dangerous sociopaths.
Yes, its violence if it goes through a complex system for the violence to happen, is done indirectly.
So yeah, our lives are ruled (and ruined) by utterly incompetent dangerous sociopaths, who will gleefully destroy the entire economy because… they like buzzwords and feeling like they are smart.
We either need to kill these people, or they will kill all of us, just give it a decade.
As I’ve always said, defund MBAs
Look I want kids to grow up and be able to pursue any passion they want, but we have to ask serious real world questions here about Austerity and I am starting to think we should entirely cut MBA programs and in general business education.
I know that sounds extreme, but we have to focus on training kids on skills that will actually be productive, useful and lead to new breakthroughs. We clearly need to fund the hard stuff like art, music and theater or we are going to collapse as a society and continue to fall behind more competitive nations because we got distracted by fluff and empty ideologies masquerading as knowledge, MBAs being exhibit A.
The purpose of business school MBAs is nothing more than networking. These degrees cost a fortune, and that’s exactly the point: to bring opportunists together. I’m almost sure it’s next to impossible to fail this degree, because it’s not about knowledge at all, but merely about gaining entry into senior management.
Sort of, there are actually smart people who go there too. The kids with connections to the jobs pull smart kids with them and then use them as workhorses and basically claim all the glory from their work. Then you might get poached by someone willing to pay more who is less abusive.
AI is the new “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”.
You’re either following the crowd or getting replaced by someone who will. Its insane
What other poor decisions are they making all the time?
See also: investment in Theranos.
These people are so easy to fucking scam with buzzwords and the right “look.”
I find it interesting how Sam Altman has the same continuous vocal fry Elizabeth Holmes used to have. It’s infuriating how well a cheap impression of gravitas performs with investors.
Ha, exactly, just like how Holmes dressed like Steve Jobs.
Meanwhile, small family-owned businesses struggle so hard financially, but make miracles to stay afloat for decades, taking the most viable long-term decisions, despite the lack of options and resource. And these people often have no formal education in the area, just the survival instinct and the pressure of a family to feed.
Any bad decision that’s made by an exec is usually just met with nods and grins by the workers while they do what’s actually necessary and try only half heartedly to follow their edicts. Execs usually have no idea what a pilot program is and every decision they make is pure gold so why not roll it out to everybody at once.
Welcome to short term shareholder value economy. They will fuck the planet and the working class so that line go up 📈
But they can be made to look good on paper. That’s where it counts. At least for the people being paid to make those bad decisions and obfuscate it with “good” numbers.
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Broken systems elevate psychopath leaders into positions of wealth and power, and people who want those things exploit the fastest path there by getting degrees who put you on that track.
By this MBA logic, do we close CompSci for the the poor code coming out of Microsoft, close Law Schools because social rights are being lost, engineering schoolings because infrastructure doesn’t meet current needs?
My point is to blame the CEOs and their shitty behaviour, not the schools that, to my knowledge, try to educate reasonable policy, law, ethics, HR, etc.
Disclaimer: not an MBA
What school encourages ethical business practices? Most schools have a 1 credit hour class on business ethics, but really teach you legalism and how to avoid breaking the law. Nowhere are they teaching actual ethics in business
Here are some of the schools I know set the pace for Business education in the US. Feels like social responsibility is more than an afterthought.
Again, not defeding, “the MBAs” running companies. I’m defending the schools
https://www.hbs.edu/mba/academic-experience/curriculum
The point is we don’t need more MBAs, we need people educated in useful skills. Should every MBA program be closed? No probably not, but we definitely have way more than we need. Cutting funding for things like MBA scholarships and closing down the majority of those programs will go a long way towards moving the majority of potential future MBA students into useful programs. We need less managers and more engineers, fewer CEOs and more chemists, hell fewer analysts and more plumbers.
There are many problems with modern capitalism and even if we never handed out another MBA degree again that would not even remotely solve everything, but the MBAs are making the problem worse. It’s a minor thing but it’s an easy thing to do and it would make a difference small as it is.
I think organizing labor is a useful skill. I just think doing it to the sole benefit of “shareholder value” is what’s killing us. Is that liberal of me? I can’t imagine a society where work isn’t done by people and work needs some form of organization.
As if we weren’t going to figure out how shitty LLM’s are organically.
Yeah, that tends to happen when you blow billions on snake oil.
I’ve sold AI systems to Brockway, Ogdenville, and North Haverbrook! And by gum it put them on the map!
Sure, the majority aren’t seeing a payoff. But we only really care about the Magnificent Seven and their increased revenue from government contracts (particularly Pentagon weapons platforms and public-private surveillance deals).
And they can’t afford to stay behind in their opinion. If there’s a chance general AI works and they’re not using it when it kicks in, they’re going to be left behind in the dust.
Of course this would also shake apart the labor market, the remaining taters of the social fabric and the economy, but that’s a problem for next quarter.
Pfft. You and your logic and reason.
Yet again those at the top waste untold sums of money and resources on the new shiny and everyone else is left to deal with the mess they created. While they float away on their golden parachute.
Shouldn’t that be a net negative because of loss of knowledge and talent during ai-inspired layoffs?
Everydown turn there are layoffs and loss of talent. They alweys find something ‘unique’ to blame it on. Then things recover and they hire people who learn it again.
until 10 years have passed I refuse to call ai job loss anything other than the latest iteration of that pattern. Time will tell.
Yeah. Then big corp could buy small corp.
Well like much analysis of economic impact, that’s hard to quantify, so we can just assume it’s trivial.
nah that’s a separate department and they deliberately keep that book as far away from the overall study as possible.
Good. Fuck 'em.
You mean they couldn’t just stop paying their workers?
I thought AI was supposed to replace all that FTE overhead that gets in the way of shareholder profits!!!111111oneoneoneoenone
Business morons who don’t understand tech is what this bubble is all about. I can’t believe so many businesses have sunk hundreds of billions of dollars into technology that fundamentally cannot do what they fantasize it to do.
