If Your Favorite Company Jumped for AI, Would You Jump Too?
New reporting shows companies are pursuing “AI” because they have FOMO, not because it’s good for business.
by Alex Hanna and Decca Muldowney
In an analysis* of corporate filings and executive transcripts at S&P 500 Companies, the Financial Times discovered what many of us had already guessed: companies are pursuing “AI” because everyone else is doing it, not because it’s good for business.
“When it comes to AI adoption, many companies aren’t guided by strategy but by ‘Fomo’... For some leaders, the question isn’t ‘What problem am I solving?’ but ‘What if my competitor solves it first?’” Haritha Khandabattu, a senior director analyst at the mega-consultancy Gartner, told the FT.
We saw this coming quite some time ago. As Emily and Alex wrote in The AI Con: "AI hype plays on FOMO (the fear of missing out): it is the repeated message that a set of technologies... will change the world and you, the consumer or corporate manager, absolutely must use it, lest you be left in the dust."
Will companies listen now that a big consultancy like Gartner said it? 🤔
The big excitement of “AI” has been around automation and increasing productivity. But as the FT reports: “Most of the anticipated benefits, such as increased productivity, were vaguely stated and harder to categorise than the risks.”
Unfortunately, we also have to add an asterisk* next to the word analysis, because the FT says they analyzed these corporate filings and executive transcripts with ChatGPT, so take the results with a grain of salt.
You can learn more how companies want to implement “AI” without having any idea what it means to do so by listening to these Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 episodes:
In An LLM Says LLMs Can Do Your Job, we discuss OpenAI’s “GPTs are GPTs” paper-shaped object and a report for Goldman Sachs that suggests a bunch of jobs are ripe for automation. We’d like to disagree. Like the FT, OpenAI also did its analysis* with “AI”. [Livestream, Podcast, Transcript]
In AGI Funny Business (Model), author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, joins us to discuss the business model behind the current AI hype wave and his report for AI Now. [Livestream, Podcast, Transcript]
In OpenAI's Ridiculous 'Reasoning', we tackle the hype around ChatGPT itself and its capabilities, including the very wrong idea that it's capable of “complex reasoning” - journalists please take note. [Livestream, Podcast, Transcript]
Our book, The AI Con, is now available wherever fine books are sold!
