Execs Confused and Horrified by the Huge AI Bills After Thinking They Could Replace Workers for Free [View all]

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/execs-confused-horrified-huge-ai-135718505.html

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The bad news is that this situation has created a world-historic financial market that, by some metrics, is looking worse than the run-up to the Great Depression. The good news is that this future of an AI takeover is looking increasingly unlikely, at least at the industry's current pace, a fact which is now dawning on some of the biggest rubes and dupes in the corporate world.

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The KPMG report, initially flagged by the Register, surveyed 2,145 senior execs across 20 countries, finding that an astonishing 29 percent of them had no idea where the growing costs associated with AI were coming from.

A further third confessed that their own cluelessness about AI economics was a barrier to successfully deploying AI in the workplace, the Register notes.

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"As usage-based pricing models become more common, many organizations are still building the capabilities required to forecast, monitor, and manage AI spending effectively," the report authors write. Translation: one third of execs had no plan for how to actually use AI productively, a fact which is becoming increasingly clear now that the meter is running.

The finding underscores what many workers forced to use AI tools on the job have come to suspect: that an alarming number of corporate leaders treat AI as a plug-and-play solution for lowering overheard without understanding the how of it all, a kind of magical thinking entirely divorced from practical reality.