ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Last year, 39% of companies said AI had touched their profits at all. This year, according to McKinsey's State of AI report, it's 37%. It didn't go up — and in between, planned corporate AI spending roughly doubled. If your AI budget got bigger and your P&L didn't, you're not behind. You're the majority. And the majority is about to get asked some uncomfortable questions.
This week isn't about AI strategy failing or corners being cut. It's an accounting question. The people using these tools swear they're faster, and I believe them — so where's the value going? I walk through the flat line from four directions: McKinsey (37% any EBIT impact, 6% "high performers," both flat), Domino Data Lab (57% whose AI return isn't outpacing investment — unchanged two years running, even as 93% say production got better), PwC's CEO Survey (one in eight got both revenue and cost benefits), and BCG (spend doubling, 94% committed to keep spending regardless). I give the J-curve argument its due — Solow, the dynamo, Brynjolfsson — and then point out the fine print: the curve only bends for the factories that redesigned the floor.
Then, where the hours went. Saved time has no default destination; if nobody decides where it goes, it goes into email. I share what we've lived through — dozens of "automations" built to take work off people's plates, then rewritten when the tooling changed, with business partners blaming AI — when the real problem was that nobody had asked whether those processes were worth doing at all. Automation doesn't create value. It can just make worthless work invisible. The 6% who get real returns are nearly three times as likely to have redesigned the workflow. So: one question and four moves for Monday — should this process exist; name the P&L line; decide where freed capacity goes; redesign one workflow end to end; and set a kill date. "Next year" is not a milestone. A date is.
