Deutsche Bank called it “the summer AI turned ugly,” and there was certainly a heated war of words between Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei over the latter’s prediction that artificial intelligence would wipe out half of all white-collar jobs. The two executives spent much of the summer trading predictions about how many jobs would be lost as AI transformed the workforce in a “fourth industrial revolution.”
But from the standpoint of Labor Day, things are looking very different. Markets got a shock in late August from an unlikely place: a survey by MIT finding that 95% of generative AI pilots at large companies were failing. That prompted a tech sell-off and talk of whether AI was forming into a stock-market bubble. And another piece of the puzzle just fell into view: the Census Bureau finds that AI adoption rates are starting to decline among major firms. After two years of rapid experimentation and headline-grabbing pilot projects, many corporations appear to be reassessing the real-world value of integrating AI into their operations for the long haul.
