When does the lack of ROI on AI become a problem?

I own some tech stocks and I hope I’m wrong about this. I always figured the AI ROI story would turn negative at some point, I just didn’t think it would be this year. Now I do. **The ROI was always going to become a problem** The external data is pretty consistent across every source: • SAP commissioned a study of 1,600 companies and published it themselves: average spend $26.7M, average return $4.7M, net negative • Bain found 40% of deployments show 10% improvement or less, only 4% show more than 30% • 44% of companies are funding their next AI project on savings that haven’t materialized yet • PwC found 20% of companies capture 74% of returns, meaning most companies are basically getting nothing • Amazon’s CEO said on an earnings call that the main place enterprises are winning is cutting costs, not new revenue But the real sources are the actual earnings calls and MD&As for META, MSFT, Amazon, Salesforce, and SAP. These companies are supposed to be selling the dream, so when their own words undercut it, that means something. Zuckerberg, on a call where he’s announcing $130B+ in capex: “I do not think we have a very precise plan for exactly how each product is going to scale month over month.” Satya Nadella basically admitted Microsoft is waiting for its own customers to prove the ROI out before IT budgets actually shift: “IT budgets will be reshaped by a combination of business outcomes making their way into IT budgets and reallocation from other line items.” Translation: customers haven’t proven it on their own books yet. Salesforce is absorbing the cost of the AI models it uses and said they expect to be “neutral on gross margins.” Growing fast, paying for it themselves, no margin benefit yet. SAP is attaching AI to 66-90% of their big deals, which sounds great until you read that the attach is at order entry, not production deployment, and that management warned the shift to consumption pricing “could temporarily compress revenue per customer.” You can only cut costs so far. Ed Zitron put it simply: if the ROI was actually there, people would be talking about it. Instead everyone talks about what AI is going to do eventually. **Why I think it’s happening this year** I go to tech meetups every now and then. A couple years ago people were showing up with real stuff, workflows that actually changed how they worked. Now it’s the same conversation recycled every time. Last one I went to everyone was talking about using AI for personal stuff, not for work. Beyond that, a few things hit at the same time recently: • Models are just not improving at the rate they used to, and if you use them daily you can feel it • I watched Gavin Baker this week, who actually invests in semis and AI startups. The two examples he gave of business ROI were using AI to summarize stuff and a friend who talked to Claude for an hour to help diagnose his daughter’s medical condition. Then he pivoted to AGI and UBI. That’s the bull case from someone who invests in this for a living. • Altman went on CNBC and said the ROI criticism is fair, which is not something you say when the numbers are going well • Uber made a public comment about burning through their entire annual AI token budget in four months • GitHub Copilot, Salesforce, and SAP are all switching from flat subscriptions to usage-based billing, meaning every company is about to get a real number showing exactly what they spent versus what they got back. Right now that number is hidden. It won’t be for much longer. • Anthropic is going public and a sworn affidavit from their CFO earlier this year put total lifetime revenue at $5B while they market themselves as doing $19B a year. The S-1 is going to force some honesty into the conversation. Anyway I hope I’m wrong.