Do those 12% include OpenAI, Anthropic, and nVidia?

So, this is a survey. They just asked these guys if they thought the AI initiatives they've been pushing were working. In other words: "Are you a good CEO?" If you were a CEO, how do you imagine you would answer that question?

"Most CEOs say their companies aren’t yet seeing a financial return from investments in AI. Although close to a third (30%) report increased revenue from AI in the last 12 months and a quarter (26%) are seeing lower costs, more than half (56%) say they’ve realised neithe

Our small company had a couple potential hires who believed with enough of our data they could automate things like buying decisions. We declined because they weren't very convincing and asked for a lot of money to play around without a clear plan.

A lot of AI startups exist(ed) to fix flaws in early models, or add functionality not yet present.

Post MCP, post skills, post TOOLS... a lot of this stuff is baked in now, or eclipses the products a lot of these companies were building. Cursor.ai, windsurf.ai have all pivoted to training their own models. Claude Code just demolishes what Cursor.ai was building. Even just regular VS Code + copilot running sonnet 4.5 is as good or better than Cursor was in January 2025.

It's no surprise those a

100% - 56% - 12% = .....So 32% had higher costs OR lower revenues?

The shorsighted nature of U.S. businesses continues. One can reasonably say the past two years is when AI and LLMs have exploded in use. To expect to see tangible results in that time is shortsighted.

How long did it take to see tangible results when moving from horse drawn delivery vehicles to motorized trucks? Sure, you no longer had to feed, care, and house horses, but now you had to feed, care, and house your trucks. That certainly wasn't cheaper in the short term.

However, once usage for trucks becam

The reaction of the AI prophets to a story like this will simply be to say that 56% of companies in this survey needed to spend WAAAAAAAY more money on AI. You don't see benefits until you're promising to tithe your profits to it. This is the way of the church of AI. 10% of all profits, funneled directly into further developing AI and AI God will take care of you! Halleluiah

AI is a tool for employees to enhance their workflow, not a way to cut jobs. pointy-haired-bosses that thought AI can reduce headcount should experience a disadvantage because they are greedy.

Really, just jumping in whole hog without even an inkling of how the newest technology can be leveraged for your specific use cases doesn't magically make you money? You don't say!

You don't give the bean counters the same hardware that say the leads of the dev teams get. They don't need the same hardware. The bean counters are using equipment for spreadsheets and email, they aren't trying to do compiles on programs that may need 64 / 128GB of RAM and 128 cores to get the times down to something sane.

Same w

The summary says

> "Just 30% [of chief executives] feel strongly optimistic about revenue growth over the next 12 months, down from 38% last year and nowhere near the 56% who felt that way in 2022."

This implies that in a rosier world, a majority of the companies would be optimistic about revenue growth. But raising revenue for most or all of the companies is not possible unless the customers (a.k.a. all the companies' employees) have more to spend, and no one is talking about raising wages as a result of AI. So where is all the extra revenue supposed to come from?

Have they tried turning it off and on again?

Perhaps they are using AI and the underlying infrastructure wrong, then.

Are they holding it correctly?