CEOs Are Obsessed With AI, But Their Pushes to Use It Keep Ending in Disaster

There may be nobody else on Earth more excited about AI than CEOs.

Driven by a compulsion to cut overhead costs — and avoid the wrath of similarly AI-fixated shareholders — executive teams across the US can’t wait to force AI onto their workforces, consequences be damned.

Corporate executives have become giddy at the thought of automating their workforces, boasting about supposed productivity gains as they lay off human workers, who now face one of the worst job markets in recent history. Even in departments where AI can’t easily replace human labor, execs have used AI as a cudgel to drive down wages, slow hiring, and raise productive quotas.

But all of that assumes AI can actually do the job of replacing human workers. As is becoming increasingly obvious over the past few months, the US' current approach to AI development — which is to throw billions of dollars into a furnace and see what comes out — is becoming increasingly shaky as results fail to bear out in the real world.

A recent Axios interview with Accenture CEO Julie Sweet underscores just how sharp the divide is between AI reality and executive fantasy. As head of a top consulting firm, Sweet has unique access to some of the most powerful minds in the world: her fellow CEOs.

At the moment, she told Axios, CEOs are "beyond obsessed" with AI, but growing increasingly frustrated as the software fails to increase revenue.

"AI, at the enterprise level, is hard. I am talking to CEOs almost every day. Their frustration is mostly about: how do I move my organization fast enough?" Sweet told the publication. "They recognize it's less about the technology, and more about the willingness to truly reinvent the work, the workforce."

It’s not hard to see where the frustration comes from.

Recent research has found that present-day AI software is failing to generate any sort of revenue whatsoever at 95 percent of the companies trying to incorporate it into their work flows.

At the same time, there can be some pretty dramatic consequences from failed AI rollouts. Rogue AI programs have wiped out proprietary databases, opened the door to devastating data breaches, and mired companies in costly legal battles.

Some corporations end up paying a human cost. Several companies, like Klarna and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, have been forced to walk back their ambitious AI automation schemes, after finding out the hard way that AI makes a poor replacement for human labor.

In the end, whether it’s worth the hassle likely depends on which rung of the corporate ladder you occupy.

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