Just the facts (about AI), ma’am

The facts that will surface in upcoming earnings calls

• AI adoption stalled nearly a year ago.
• Current capex follows a classic hype-cycle pattern
• More than 95% of AI users do not pay.
• 95% of AI-for-business deployments fail.
• Even market leaders struggle to monetize massive user bases.
• Flat-rate pricing does not recover the cost of compute.
• Token-based pricing does not recover actual compute cost.
• Extraordinary efforts to revive adoption are a new expense.
• Even Gemini 3 hallucinates at extraordinary levels.
• Optimization to reduce capex and opex is ignored.
• Valuations do not reflect fundamentals.
• The industry over-promised and under-delivered.
• New models released in 2025 did not change adoption curves.
• Hyperscaler capex is outrunning revenue by orders of magnitude.

What public filings already say

• Adobe warns there is no assurance AI products will be adopted or monetized.
• Intuit discloses significant risk of inadequate ROI.
• Autodesk cautions expected benefits and cost savings may not materialize.
• Palantir admits returns depend on adoption that may never arrive.
• Salesforce says AI is not working as they had expected.

What industry leaders are saying

Sam Altman: “Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes.”

Sundar Pichai: “We need to right-size expectations.”

Satya Nadella: “We need to be clear-eyed about the next phase”

– Published Wednesday, January 7, 2026