AI faces closing time at the cash buffet

opinion It is the season of overindulgence, and no one has overindulged like the tech industry: this year, it has burned through roughly $1.5 trillion in AI, a level of spending usually reserved for wartime. Between 2001 and 2014, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan cost the US an estimated $1.5 trillion to $1.7 trillion in direct spending. Global AI spending, according to Gartner, is forecast to reach nearly $1.5 trillion this year, putting today's AI boom in the same cash-burning league as two major wars. What's missing now - like in the last few wars - is a reason for spending this money at all. Some people are starting to ask uncomfortable questions like "When you invest all the money in the bank on a perishable technology, how many years will it take to see a return on that investment?" Yep. It's looking like closing time at the Golden Corral's endless buffet and the waiter just brought out the last platter of cash rangoon. So now with a belly full of corporate speak, banking executives who wouldn't know a server if it fell on their wingtips are vomiting "AI" and "agents" all over their press releases, so they can keep the gravy train running. Consider this recent bon mot from Larry Feinsmith, head of Global Tech Strategy, Innovation & Partnerships at JPMorgan Chase: "In the era of AI and agents, the benefits and value will be enormous, but so is the complexity." You don't say! This is from a guy who went to the Wharton School and now makes more money than most of us so that he can influence billion-dollar companies' business decisions. His advice: "buy more AI!" Why? There will be enormous value … someday. When? It’s complicated. The real question is: how many versions of that quote did he go through before he settled on that particular platitude? Or did Copilot give him an auto assist? Without AI's prompting, many of the bankers like him would have had a terrible year and not just when it comes to writing press releases. Notoriously dour economist with Apollo Global Management Torsten Slok said in October that there is essentially no growth in corporate capital spending "outside of AI," while other economists have said that AI investment is the only thing keeping the US out of a recession. Why are companies so eager to funnel cash into something that up to now has only produced business value with fancier and fancier chatbots? Microsoft is building datacenter superclusters that span continents AI has pumped hyperscale capex, capacity – but how long can it last? AI datacenter boom could end badly, Goldman Sachs warns Datacenters feel the Bern as Senator Sanders pushes bit barn building pause When customers need a quick AI victory, that use case is the first one that tumbles from the mouths of executives at massive infrastructure providers like Dell and Nvidia. Each company has bullishly predicted an AI revolution on par with the advent of electricity, only they can't seem to find a use for this trillion-dollar technological terror except "chatbot" and coming in 2025 2026 the "AI agent!" Of course, when he's not publicly backing a National Guard deployment in San Francisco, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff claims his AI agents are already working alongside customers. If so, he's developed an outlier in a field that sees agents fail 70 percent of the time, according to a Carnegie Mellon University study. This makes the AI agent boondoggle seem more akin to the CEO putting his favorite cousin to work beside you. If they win, you lose. If they lose, you lose. Forrester said that AI needs to put on a hardhat and get to work if it wants to keep winning deals, or it risks watching that spend get pushed back, with 25 percent of surveyed enterprises delaying AI spend into 2027. Customers, it seems, were beginning to notice that the investments in AI had not resulted in gains to the initials that truly matter in business: EBITDA, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. Well, you can’t spell EBITDA without AI, but the trouble is that it's in the ITDA, not in the E. They don’t teach that at Wharton. ®