"The real problem is the ROI on AI spending is.. pretty much zero. The commonly asserted use cases are the following: Chatbots Developer tools RAG/search"

I agree with you that ROI on _most_ AI spending is indeed poor, but AI is more than LLM's. Alas, what used to be called AI before the onset of the LLM era is not deemed sexy today, even though it can still make very good ROI when it is the appropriate tool for solving a problem.