"Letting FOMO drive your AI investment is a recipe for panic spending!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
Here's what Korn Ferry had to say about the current state of affairs:
"AI: It's among the most expensive keeping-up-with-the-Joneses games in corporate history" - Korn Ferry Report, 2025
Add to that this gem that I dug out in my research about how organizations are approaching AI:
"Step one: we're going to use LLMs. Step two: What should we use them for?" - IBM Report, 2025
All of this got me thinking quite a bit, since many of my keynotes cover the gap between the reality of the AI deployment and the promise - or what we might call a reality gap. I set out to do some research, gathering over 300 recent articles about this issue, and pulled together two reports. You should go through them.
The first is the Great AI ROI (Return on Investment) Reckoning of 2025.
Here's the reality check: despite unprecedented AI adoption, organizations face a critical disconnect between spending and results.
- a high adoption rate: From one survey, there is a 71
... Show more..."Letting FOMO drive your AI investment is a recipe for panic spending!" - Futurist Jim Carroll
Here's what Korn Ferry had to say about the current state of affairs:
"AI: It's among the most expensive keeping-up-with-the-Joneses games in corporate history" - Korn Ferry Report, 2025
Add to that this gem that I dug out in my research about how organizations are approaching AI:
"Step one: we're going to use LLMs. Step two: What should we use them for?" - IBM Report, 2025
All of this got me thinking quite a bit, since many of my keynotes cover the gap between the reality of the AI deployment and the promise - or what we might call a reality gap. I set out to do some research, gathering over 300 recent articles about this issue, and pulled together two reports. You should go through them.
The first is the Great AI ROI (Return on Investment) Reckoning of 2025.
Here's the reality check: despite unprecedented AI adoption, organizations face a critical disconnect between spending and results.
- a high adoption rate: From one survey, there is a 71-88% rate of enterprise AI adoption - organizations are busy implementing AI solutions globally
- a high failure rate: 95% all all pilots fail. There are far too many generative AI pilots with no measurable impact
- $0 Clear ROI: In many cases, organizations are seeing little tangible return from the majority of AI investments
Despite unprecedented adoption, organizations are seeing a huge disconnect between spending and results.
Even so, there is a massive AI investment surge, despite these poor results:
- 89% of organizations plan to increase AI investments in 2025
- 75% of companies are allocating up to half their IT budget to AI
- There is a 3x expected increase in AI spending this year compared to the previous year
And all this fits into the idea of the Confidence Paradox that I covered the other day. There is a lot of executive optimism about AI:
- 85% of respondents say their AI investments meet or exceed expectations
- 76% identify AI as the primary driver of long-term growth
The reality check compared to such optimism?
- Only 23% report initiatives delivering expected returns
- benefits often aren't readily evident to leadership
Yikes! What kind of magic is this?
Read the full post at the link.
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Futurist Jim Carroll has long believed that when it comes to AI, we are currently living at the top of the hype cycle.
**#AI** **#ROI** **#Investment** **#FOMO** **#Strategy** **#Implementation** **#Hype** **#Returns** **#Reality** **#Technology**
Original post: jimcarroll.com/2025/09/decodin…
