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Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI splurge (www.theregister.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 1 point 9 months ago (6 children)

If you look at the numbers in the article the majority "broke even" but significantly more companies experienced gains from AI than experienced losses from AI. The headline is crafted to bait clicks.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    Huh, I read the article and I don't see anything about more companies experiencing gains than losses. Are you talking about a different article than https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/20/pwc_ai_ceo_survey/?

    Only 12 percent reported both lower costs and higher revenue, while 56 percent saw neither benefit. Twenty-six percent saw reduced costs, but nearly as many experienced cost increases.

    This is the closest thing I saw.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    They were referring to the original article that The Register is citing: https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/c-suite-insights/ceo-survey.html

    Scroll down to the 3x3 grid, and you will see that the percentages in the green squares (corresponding to benefits) add up to more than the percentages in the red squares (corresponding to drawbacks). You can see from this that The Register cherry-picked the numbers to tell a particular narrative. For the sake of illustration, were one trying to push the opposite narrative, one could just as accurately have said that only 13% of companies experienced worse outcomes as a result of using AI, whereas 87% experienced neutral or better outcomes!

    (Just to be clear, though, I do think that a survey of the prevailing attitudes of CEOs is not a great way of obtaining an objective metric for anything other than the prevailing attitude of CEOs.)

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    The elephant in the room is 42% "we bought this and it didn't do shit".

    Also, the "I am a CEO who admits I fucked up" boxes don't count. Those were always going to round to 0%. LoL.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago

    The elephant in the room is 42% “we bought this and it didn’t do shit”.

    It depends on whether the cost of adopting AI was included or not; if it was, then buying AI did not hurt, which could theoretically be cited as justifying additional experimentation with it. If buying AI was not included in the costs, then arguably this box is simply wrong because it did increase costs.

    (But again, given that this is just a survey of CEOs, it's not like there is anything rigorous about any of this...)

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Hey, thanks for clarifying, I appreciate it!

    Picture for people who do not want to click the link.

    Am I just colorblind? I see 0%, 42%, 12%, and 1% in red. I see 13%, 12%, and 8% in green. You would have to remove "no change" in 42% for your assertion about green square percentages summing to more than red square percentages; though it does keep your point about drawback vs. benefit percentage true since "no change" is neither good nor bad.

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