The Great AI ROI Lie Nobody in wants to Say Out Loud by Abhijeet Jha The Great AI ROI Lie Nobody in wants to Say Out Loud by Abhijeet Jha

The Great AI ROI Lie Nobody in wants to Say Out Loud

Abhijeet Jha

Abhijeet Jha

The Great AI ROI Lie Nobody In The Boardroom Wants To Say Out Loud

3 min read
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May 17, 2026
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I’m going to say something that might get me unfollowed.
Most companies buying into “AI transformation” right now?
They’re not transforming anything.
They’re gift-wrapping their broken processes in a chatbot and calling it innovation.
Here’s what’s actually happening in 2025:
A company spends $2M licensing an enterprise LLM.
They slap it on top of a workflow that already didn’t work.
The chatbot hallucinates. The team still uses Excel.
The CTO writes a press release about “AI-powered efficiency.”
The quarterly report shows 4% productivity gain.
LinkedIn celebrates.
Nobody asks where the number came from.
I work in AI. I train these models. I’ve seen what goes inside the sausage.
And I can tell you — the gap between what’s being sold and what’s being delivered is not a gap.
It’s a canyon.
McKinsey says gen AI could add $4.4 trillion annually to the global economy.
Cool.
Meanwhile, 80% of enterprise AI projects fail to make it past pilot stage. (MIT Sloan, 2024)
So either McKinsey is living in a simulation, or someone’s math is catastrophically optimistic.
Both, probably.
And then there’s the internet.
Go open any blog right now. Any “thought leadership” article. Any product description.
You can feel it.
That strange, smooth, confident, completely soulless prose that says everything and means nothing.
“Leveraging cutting-edge synergies to unlock transformative value across the stakeholder ecosystem.”
That’s not writing. That’s a probability distribution cosplaying as a human being.
We now have a name for it: AI Slop.
And companies are pumping it out by the terabyte — not because it works, but because it’s cheap and fast and the boss saw a demo and got excited.
Here’s the honest truth nobody wants to post:
Generative AI is genuinely powerful technology.
But it’s being deployed by organizations too scared to actually rethink how they work.
So instead of fixing the broken meeting culture — they AI-summarize the broken meetings.
Instead of rethinking bloated content strategy — they 10x the bloated content with AI.
Instead of hiring people who can think — they hire people to prompt.
You don’t fix a leaking pipe by automating the mopping.
The real productivity revolution isn’t happening in the Fortune 500 boardrooms.
It’s happening in a bedroom somewhere — a solo developer, a student, a small team — who’s using these tools to actually reimagine how work gets done.
Not layering. Replacing.
The bubble won’t pop dramatically.
It’ll just quietly deflate.
Companies will stop renewing licenses. Vendors will quietly pivot. The press releases will slow down.
And in 2027, someone will write a Harvard Business Review case study on “why the first wave of enterprise AI failed” and everyone will nod like they knew all along.
They did not know all along.
I’m not anti-AI. I literally build this stuff for a living.
I’m anti-bullshit.
And right now, there’s a lot of bullshit wearing an AI name tag at a very expensive conference.
The question isn’t “are you using AI?”
The question is: are you using it to avoid thinking, or to think better?
Drop your honest take below. I want to hear from both sides.
(Especially from the people who disagree — your comment will also feed the algorithm, so.)
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Posted Aug 26, 2026

A critical essay on measuring enterprise AI ROI, fixing workflows before automation, and separating meaningful adoption from AI hype.