How the AI FOMO Turned into an AI Hangover at Corporate America

The useful part

Add us on Google Add us on Google Companies in 2026 are expected to spend over $2.5 trillion on AI, a 47% increase on 2025. This is a spending spree never seen before in the history of organizational investments, and it's driven in part by companies giving all employees access to GenAI tools such as Co-Pilot, Gemini, or Claude. Recommended Video Wondering what drove this surge, over the last year I asked hundreds of leaders if they felt their company was trailing others on AI adoption.

How it works

• Third, an increasing concern about how many employees appear to be doing worse work, while feeling more overwhelmed—the opposite of what leaders thought they paid for.
• As someone who makes a living studying how our brains show up at work, this is a terrible idea.
• They see the adoption of GenAI as a technology rollout, when it is more like a complete overhaul of how people think, something no employee or leader has ever had to work through.
• Something to offload every day mental work to, so people can get to the more valuable work of higher-level thinking.
• Their raw output goes up, so they think the quality of their work does, too.

What to take from it

more, at least the way they use them now, is only likely to make a big problem even bigger. Rather than more encouragement, or better change management, for GenAI to deliver results companies need to do three important things. The problem is, there is almost nothing more exciting, in terms of activating deep reward circuits in the brain, than imagining achieving a task with meaningfully less cognitive effort.

Example or evidence

• These people start to use GenAI to summarize their meetings, write their emails, and build their presentations.
• Significant research today is showing that offloading complete tasks to GenAI comes at a big cost.
• Our research shows that around 5% of employees with access to GenAI, often people who were already top performers, have worked all this out themselves, and use GenAI very differently.
• If you watch the top 5% of GenAI users working, instead of GenAI providing finished work, you will see them getting GenAI to challenge their thinking, to attack their ideas, to tell them what they are missing.

Details worth keeping

Math doesn't care, either' 3 'They'll be hit very hard': Trump sends roughly 9,000 troops and a third aircraft carrier to the Middle East after warning strikes on Iran 1 Trump removes chairs for TSA agents, saying they 'must meet fitness for duty requirements' 2 Mike Rowe on America's great tradesperson shortage: 'I don't care what your politics are. Getty Images Add Fortune on Google for similar content.

Related coverage

• Asiatimes: TOKYO – After two years of near-vertical capital spending, euphoric earnings calls, and GPU shortages that became their own economic indicator, the mood toward AI has dramatically shifted.
• Cnbc: The AI narrative has flipped to a focus on the risk with the tech unpopular with the public and projections of order backlogs beyond a few quarters now suspect.
• Fortune: The case for slowing AI down got turbocharged last week when Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon publicly resigned, but adoption is already way too slow.
• Investinglive: The market has gone through various phases where stock markets sold off on fears surrounding AI.
• Marketwatch: The latest cracks in the AI trade are emerging at a particularly troubling time for investors.