Exploring the power and pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence.
Has the productivity impact of AI gone missing in action? We are now well over three years on from the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, since when there has been huge investment in AI across the global economy. No less than 61% of all venture capital ($259 billion) went into AI companies in 2025,…
How would you react if your AI costs went up an order of magnitude next month? AI promises productivity improvements in areas such as software code generation, but at what economic cost? Software budgets in large enterprises have traditionally been heavily skewed towards support and maintenance, with 60% or more of software budgets allocated to…
Enterprises trying to use large language models (LLMs) to access their corporate data are hitting a brick wall. It is easy for a vendor to demo a natural language interface that allows users to write prompts that access corporate data. In the demo, a user types in something like: “show me my most profitable customers”…
Corporations are investing a fortune in large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude based on the promise that they can automate business processes, reduce costs and provide new insights. The reality has proved much trickier than the sales pitch, but just how reliable are these models at basic calculations and logic anyway? A research…
Despite huge investment, turning AI hype into sustainable profit is proving far harder than expected. Vast amounts of venture capital have gone into AI companies, or at least into companies that claim to be AI companies in their pitch decks. In 2025 no less than $192 billion was invested in AI startups, 61% of the…
The restaurant industry generates over $4 trillion to the global economy, and employs at least 50 million people (possibly as many as 100 million). As with any industry, there is potential for the use of AI in various aspects of it, from back-office operations like booking and ordering systems, through to personalised marketing and staff…
Large organisations have always struggled with having an agreed, corporate-wide set of data for things that cross organisational boundaries: customers, products, locations, assets etc. A dedicated multi-billion-dollar software market, master data management (MDM), grew up to address this issue. Why is it so hard to get a single list of customers or products? The average…
More than three years after the generative AI explosion that started with ChatGPT, we are seeing a distinctly mixed picture in terms of AI adoption and productivity. In February 2026, the Goldman Sachs Chief Economist assessed the effect of AI on US productivity as “basically zero”, and multiple studies have found that the failure rate…
When an AI agent is asked to keep an email secret from another user, you would hope that it would find a way of doing this without destroying the email server, but you would be disappointed. The field of artificial intelligence (AI) is moving from chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude to “agentic AI”, whereby AI…
A series of studies have now shown that corporate AI projects are failing at a disturbingly high rate. MIT in August 2025 found that 95% of AI projects fail to deliver any economic return. The same was found at the same 95% failure rate by Boston Consulting Group in September 2025. Similar, albeit slightly lower,…