Steve Lohr, Companies Are Pouring Billions Into A.I. It Has Yet to Pay Off. NYTimes, Aug. 13, 2025.
According to recent research from McKinsey & Company, nearly eight in 10 companies have reported using generative A.I., but just as many have reported “no significant bottom-line impact.”
A.I. technology has been racing ahead with chatbots like ChatGPT, fueled by a high-stakes arms race among tech giants and superrich start-ups and prompting an expectation that everything from back-office accounting to customer service will be revolutionized. But the payoff for businesses outside the tech sector is lagging behind, plagued by issues including an irritating tendency by chatbots to make stuff up.
That means that businesses will have to continue to invest billions to avoid falling behind — but it could be years before the technology delivers an economywide payoff, as companies gradually figure out what works best.
Next: Slough of Despond:
Gartner, a research and advisory firm that charts technological “hype cycles,” predicts that A.I. is sliding toward a stage it calls “the trough of disillusionment.” The low point is expected next year, before the technology eventually becomes a proven productivity tool, said John-David Lovelock, the chief forecaster at Gartner.
That was the pattern with past technologies like personal computers and the internet — early exuberance, the hard slog of mastering a technology, followed by a transformation of industries and work.
Replace workers?
A.I. will eventually replace entire swaths of human employees, many predict, a perspective that is being widely embraced and echoed in the corporate mainstream. At the Aspen Ideas Festival in June, Jim Farley, the chief executive of Ford Motor, said, “Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the U.S.”
Whether that type of revolutionary change occurs, and how soon, depends on the real-world testing ground of many businesses.
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