# Companies Are Stuck in AI Pilot Purgatory, and the Bill Is Coming Due > Futurist Amy Webb says businesses have fallen into a spending trap. Artificial intelligence lowers the cost of individual tasks while quietly inflating everything around them, and she expects the accounting to catch up within two years. - Source: Morning Week - Canonical URL: https://morningweek.com/article/companies-are-stuck-in-ai-pilot-purgatory-and-the-bill-is-coming-due - Author: Morning Week Newsroom - Section: Tech - Published: 2026-08-30T13:48:24.218Z - Updated: 2026-08-30T13:48:24.218Z - Tags: artificial intelligence, Amy Webb, corporate AI spending, AI pilots, Bain and Company, dotcom bubble --- Amy Webb has spent nearly two decades telling companies what is coming next. As chief executive of the Future Today Strategy Group and a professor at NYU Stern, she built her reputation forecasting technology shifts before they hit mainstream boardrooms. Her latest warning is less about what artificial intelligence can do and more about what it is quietly costing the companies that have already bought in. Her argument echoes a pattern familiar from the dotcom years: spending racing ahead of any proof the money will come back. ## Stuck in pilot purgatory Webb describes many corporate AI programs as trapped in what she calls pilot purgatory, a cycle that resembles endlessly swiping through a dating app without ever committing to anyone. One of her clients, she says, ran between 14 and 15 separate AI pilots without ever scaling a single one into full production. Each new pilot tends to skip the slower work of legal and IT integration that would let it become a durable part of the business, which means that when a company is finally ready to commit, it is often starting over from zero rather than building on what came before. ## The abundance paradox Early AI wins can feel like abundance, Webb argues, quick gains in output or efficiency that create a sense of already having won. The trouble is that this feeling of abundance tends to be misleading. Once a company tallies up the duplicated pilots, the tools that were never properly integrated, and the momentum lost switching from one experiment to the next, that early abundance ends up costing far more than it appeared to save. ## Too many decks, too little judgment One example Webb points to is the rise of what she calls insta-decks. Presentations that used to take a week to assemble now come together in a single day with AI assistance. The catch is that teams are now receiving roughly five times as many decks to review, turning a genuine time saving into a fresh source of decision paralysis. There is a subtler cost too. When AI takes over the reasoning behind a decision, employees report feeling less ownership over the outcome, a quiet drag on accountability that does not show up on any spreadsheet. Swiping through AI pilots feels efficient right up until a company realizes it never actually built a lasting relationship with any of the tools it tried. ## The numbers behind the warning Bain and Company surveyed 951 companies in June and found that 40 percent achieved AI cost savings under 10 percent, even though most had aimed for returns somewhere between 11 and 20 percent. Despite those underwhelming results, 90 percent of the same companies said they were still increasing their AI budgets. Meanwhile the debate over what AI means for headcount remains murky at best. Investor Marc Andreessen has claimed large companies are roughly 75 percent overstaffed, a framing some executives have used to justify AI driven cuts, but data from Oxford Economics shows layoffs explicitly attributed to AI account for only about 4.5 percent of total job losses nationally, a far cry from the sweeping disruption the rhetoric implies. Webb expects visible cracks in corporate AI spending to appear within the next two years, once Wall Street stops accepting optimistic pilot metrics and starts demanding proof that the money translated into results. It is a dynamic with clear echoes of the dotcom era, except this time the reckoning is playing out inside individual corporate budgets rather than in stock valuations alone, one unscaled pilot at a time. --- Originally published by Morning Week. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://morningweek.com/article/companies-are-stuck-in-ai-pilot-purgatory-and-the-bill-is-coming-due.