Nevertheless it is also that the unbelievable speed of AI progress and adoption has made me think industries are more sensitive to news than they perhaps needs to be. I spoke with Martha Gimbel, who leads the Yale Budget Lab and coauthored a report finding that AI has not yet modified anyone’s jobs. What I gathered is that Gimbel, like many economists, thinks on an extended time scale than anyone within the AI world is used to.
“It might 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 many of the economy continues to be determining what the hell AI even does, not deciding whether to desert it.
The opposite response 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 as a substitute point to pilots not moving quickly enough, firms lacking the precise data to construct higher AI, or a number of other strategic reasons.
Even when there’s incredible pressure, especially on public firms, to take a position heavily in AI, a couple of have taken big swings on the technology only to drag back. The buy now, pay later company Klarna laid off staff and paused hiring in 2024, claiming it could use AI as a substitute. Lower than a 12 months 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 usage of AI voice assistants. The overwhelming majority of Coca-Cola advertisements, in line with experts I spoke with, aren’t made with generative AI, despite the corporate’s $1 billion promise.
So for now, the query stays unanswered: Are there firms on the market rethinking how much their bets on AI pays off, or when? And if there are, what’s keeping them from talking out loud about it? (If you happen to’re on the market, email me!)
