Prophecies that artificial intelligence (AI) will leave millions of people jobless are falling short. Even the technology's main ideologues are admitting their mistakes. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently stated he was "happy to be wrong" about the rapid pace of job displacement, dismissing any imminent AI apocalypse for office workers.
Vitaliy Kiro, a consultant on AI implementation and digital transformation, writes about this in his column.
As Vitaliy Kiro explains, the current hype misrepresents reality. What is commonly referred to as AI is actually Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Gemini. This is not intelligence in the true sense, but a statistical machine that predicts the next word based on texts from the internet. Genuine autonomous intelligence remains a distant prospect, yet developers inflate expectations to attract billions in investment.
Today, businesses are starting to notice the flip side: the technology has proven to be extraordinarily expensive. Major companies are already tallying losses and taking legal action. A Pizza Hut franchisee in the US filed a $100 million lawsuit against Yum! Brands over the forced implementation of an AI delivery system called Dragontail. Instead of optimizing operations, the system slashed on-time deliveries from 90% to less than half, causing sales in New York to plummet by 10%.
Starbucks abandoned its AI inventory system after nine months because it failed to accurately count syrup bottles. Even tech giants are buckling under the financial strain. Uber's Chief Operating Officer admitted that AI expenses are hard to justify, as the company burned through its annual AI budget in just four months. Meanwhile, in May 2026, Microsoft began revoking licenses for the AI tool Claude Code from its own Windows and Teams engineers, after token fees depleted their annual budget long before the end of the year.
According to Gartner forecasts, over 40% of AI agent projects will be abandoned by the end of 2027 due to high costs and low ROI. Nevertheless, driven by the inertia of the hype, total spending on the AI sector in 2026 could exceed $2.5 trillion.
The technology is currently moving through the "trough of disillusionment" — a natural sobering period following inflated expectations, much like the dot-com crash in the early 2000s or the blockchain slump in 2018. While AI serves as a useful tool, it is too early to let it run a business. For now, instead of taking people's jobs, it is successfully taking millions from companies that blindly believed in a technological miracle.
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