56% of CEOs report zero financial return from AI in 2026 (PwC survey, n=4,454)
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There is just too much incentive to say... no, to BELIEVE... both that AI yields 10x productivity that AI is useless.
I am swinging wildly between the two too, personally. The more time I spend with AI, the more I am developing this split personality where one part of me says "I hope this thing blows up before I lose my job and my children never have the chance to have an office job again" and the other one says "AI is actually not easy! You have to know how to use it well, deveop tools, plan, curate your context... This means I am acquiring useful skills here, tring to port Flappy Bird to COBOL".
And obviously, depending which side controls my cortex in that moment, I may err on the "AI is useless crap" or the "AI all the things!" side
Similarly many have reported a sense of say programming productivity but a more objective reflection later on reveals the myriad issues with constantly and subtly heralding in large quantities of lower quality code and blowing past any caution or rigourkus discipline that would come with the laying down of lines of code “by hand”.
I'm having coworkers resign due to AI mandates from upper management. Some of them are saying they are going to move on from the tech industry
It's not just doom scrolling. AI is having a substantial negative impact on some people
Once the execs or my personal manager implement AI requirements, I'll have to start lying, which I really prefer not to do. If they start tracking, then I'll have to vibecode a script to make bullshit requests to the API each day. And if they start auditing, then I'll just check out (more than usual) and wait to be fired. They're only hurting themselves with this shit.
The headline number (12% of CEOs generating measurable returns) gets cited a lot, but I think the more revealing finding is the 56% with zero financial impact.
These are companies with enterprise AI budgets, dedicated teams, and access to every tool on the market and the majority are getting nothing back.
PwC calls it "Pilot Purgatory." The pattern: AI gets deployed in isolated, tactical projects that don't connect to revenue. internal tooling, content drafts, meeting summaries while the 12% they call the "Vanguard" are using AI in the product and customer experience itself (44% of Vanguard vs 17% of everyone else).
What I found interesting from a solo founder angle: the structural barriers causing large companies to fail at this “bureaucracy, legacy systems, misaligned incentives, multi-department approval processes” don't exist at the one-person scale.
The bottleneck for small operators is different: it's not knowing which workflows are worth building, in what order, and what "system-level" vs "task-level" use actually means in practice.
Curious if others have a take on why the enterprise failure rate is this high despite the investment, and whether the Vanguard pattern (AI into the product, not just the back office) matches what people are seeing in practice.
Are you saying that from what you see, small operators also fail to get ROI, but for different reasons?
Enterprises usually struggle because of structure: approvals, incentives, legacy systems, fragmentation.
Small operators usually struggle because they stay at the task level "prompt-by-prompt productivity boosts" instead of building workflow-level or system-level leverage.
If they really want me to try something new, they will give me the space to try things where I am free to fail quietly and privately, pivot, and continue trying things. Asking for ship dates on day one is no way to operate projects with so many unknown unknowns. No one wants to learn and fail with an audience.
I don't find it strange, having routinely tanked my own chances/social credit for initiatives... because, like the parent, I don't want a target on my back. Somebody above thinks I do, though, apparently. Experience isn't conditioned on... that experience, if that makes sense. Unpleasant to say the least.
Where you see jealousy, which is a strange thing to invite, I see fear of missing out/rat-racing. Pass. Plenty of motivators and opportunity without the charade. Or, to put it charitably, noise/competition/advertising.
All to say, the initiatives are usually loaded with expectations, reasonable and not. Tread carefully.
> Where you see jealousy, which is a strange thing to invite,
Any desirable position invites slight jealousy. It is no different then when you have low pressure project, project that uses cool language, project with the good manager. I used the word in that sense, in the the "horrible they are going to dislike me" sense.
> I see fear of missing out/rat-racing. Pass. Plenty of motivators and opportunity without the charade.
This seems oddly out of place to me? These initiatives usually give you more freedom and "customer wants it now" kind of pressure.
Organizations are large, they gave us gifts like the Peter Principle. I'm sure that situation and plenty others exist. I provided my experience/anecdote, showing yours might not be encompassing. Apologies, meant no detraction. Point being, the initiatives are often overrated and rather easy to ignore. By no means am I saying everyone ignores them [or should].
> Any desirable position invites slight jealousy. It is no different then when you have low pressure project, project that uses cool language, project with the good manager. I used the word in that sense, in the the "horrible they are going to dislike me" sense.
Of course, that's why I call it a rat race. A group running towards the same things... to be disappointed, in my experience. The freedom is welcome, the 'customer [or peer] wants it now' pressure can be left behind. None of this requires going out of your way, however. Perhaps that is why organizations may struggle, regardless, I'm thankful for it.
edit: format and phrasing
A co-worker of mine had an idea recently (not AI related). He told our manager and sr director about it. I think now it’s gone up to the VP level. The whole project hinges on a very specific thing working that some other team needs to do with a vendor tool and is having a lot of trouble actually getting right. Meanwhile, he’s now been asked to make multiple presentations to justify and defend it, and there are 2 or 3 separate project managers trying to track it, each with their own set of weekly meetings, tracking spreadsheet, and other such things. All those PMs are also asking for timelines and dates for a lot of unknown unknowns. All our time is being engulfed by ceremony and bureaucracy, and we don’t even know if it will work yet. If that one piece doesn’t pan out, it will be a very public failure and we’ll then be expected to come up with some other option. My part of it also involves a vendor tool. When I POC’d my part, it worked fine. When I went to set it up with some real data later, the tool isn’t working, despite the POC still running and updating fine. I can’t even replicate the POC again, but it might randomly work next week. There are bugs in systems I don’t control. It’s not a total deal breaker, but it’s a risk and may require a pivot that would fundamentally change how parts of it work that have already been presented.
Had he waited a bit to see if it will actually work, it would be no big deal and wouldn’t have cost us much time. Instead, if the vendor tool falls through, or we need to pivot to work around a bug, we now need to show that to all these people, explain why it didn’t work, and get beat up about it. We also need to pretend to be busy with this and make progress on it, when we’re in a holding pattern waiting for our dependency that may or may not work. We also found out this week that if someone on that other team makes a small mistake, it wipes out everything and the house of cards crumbles. I personally think it’s a big enough risk to scrap the whole idea and find something else, but it’s too late for that now.
Of course, I tend to like to work in the background. I want the organization to function better and more smoothly. I’m not just seeking glory. I’ve still ended up being the one our team tapped when the CIO came knocking for some big project he wanted to see done quickly, despite trying to stay out of it. I don’t think anyone was jealous of me, they were all happy that they didn’t have to deal with all the uncertainty. The only good thing about that was because it was the CIO asking, it was very easy to ignore everything else and I was able to knock it out pretty fast.
Maybe you’ve worked in companies with less bureaucracy or cultures that can handle these types of projects better. For us, it feels like no good deed goes unpunished, so it’s just easier to keep your mouth shut and focus on the work until there is something actually worth showing. That is especially true for these grass roots projects vs big corporate sponsored projects that are happening no matter what.
Given worker access to generative LLMs, plus training and motivation to use them, LLMs are effective for certain workflows. Those workflows tend to be personal, one-offs, or summarization in nature: write a bash script for this headache I have every day; tell me what colleague X is trying to say in his 1200-word email, since his writing is garbage and he can't get to the point; "what's the Excel formula syntax for this other thing that I keep forgetting?"; etc.
So the time and mental-energy savings inures to the workers, mostly from coordination tasks that don't directly create core value. And then those savings aren't "reinvested" into value-producing activities whose benefits would inure to the firm because the workers have no incentive to do so; don't know how to create core value; don't have the skills to create core value; or aren't permitted to do those activities by higher-ups.
Bottom line: LLMs are eating busywork coordination activities — hence no impact on most firms' bottom lines.
I feel like both the name and the description miss the mark though - the use isn't in pilots or isolated projects, it's individual people using it to find stuff and read/write/code/work/make decisions for them, and none of that is going to drive strategic value until companies raise expectations on productivity to take advantage of it.
It makes me think of a couple of bullet points from that "An AI CEO said something honest" post[1]:
> - majority of workers have no reason to be super motivated, they want to do their 9-5 and get back to their life
> - they're not using AI to be 10x more effective they're using it to churn out their tasks with less energy spend
Generally agree with the peer comment, carrot vs stick applies (ie: 'safety'). There are more, arguably better, moves. Demanding juice from a husk, hmm. Selecting for fresh graduates/those without leverage, still, I see.
AI adoption and Solow's productivity paradox
This is a lie. It can't be zero. It is negative.
Who are the people using these tools to create successful businesses and (non-AI) products?
Let's take this offline and put it on the backburner.
Who can guess!