{
  "id": 4408317,
  "title": "Why the AI economy is like a bad dating app — drowning in decks, pilot purgatory — and it’s playing out like the dotcom bubble, except worse",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/08/30/why-the-ai-economy-is-like-a-bad-dating-app-drowning-in-decks-pilot",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-08-30T10:00:00.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Fortune",
    "slug": "fortune",
    "url": "https://fortune.com/2026/08/30/ai-economy-like-dating-app-pilot-purgatory-decks-dotcom-bubble/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "As she took her Sunday bike ride, AI futurist Amy Webb realized that every CEO she consulted with was investing heavily in AI without budgeting for the costs of that abundance. Webb, the founder of the Future Today Strategy Group, a firm that has been forecasting corporate trends since 2006, has been warning of a bubble in corporate AI spending for some time now. Her concerns are based on the way AI is transforming the corporate world, much like a bad dating app or the dotcom bubble.\n\nCEO fatigue in pilot purgatory\nWebb likens the current corporate AI climate to \"pilot purgatory,\" a state of endless pilot projects that yield enormous productivity gains but leave executives unsure of how to integrate or scale them. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has described large companies as being \"overstaffed by as much as 75%\" and using AI as a \"silver bullet excuse\" for cuts stemming from pandemic-era overhiring. Despite the hype surrounding AI, Oxford Economics found that AI-cited layoffs accounted for only 4.5% of total U.S. job losses.\n\nThe illusion of abundance\nWebb argues that investing in AI feels like getting a lot of value, but the costs that come with that abundance are often overlooked. She notes that executives are experiencing the sensation of immediate satisfaction without having figured out how to productize or embed those AI initiatives into their workflows. One of her clients ran 14 or 15 generative AI pilots this year, but none of them scaled, despite using Amazon's two-pizza rule to limit team size. This lack of scaling is due to the lack of integration with legal and IT, causing executives to restart from scratch each time, which is costly.\n\nCognitive offloading and decision paralysis\nIn addition to the pilot purgatory, Webb identifies another issue as companies drowning in decks. Executives are being buried in too much analysis, leading to decision paralysis and \"insta-decks\" that used to take a week to build but now are created in a day. Moreover, AI-generated content often produces generic ideas, which can lead to a decline in perceived ownership over the work. As companies adopt AI, the sense of ownership over the resulting work declines, and psychologists are beginning to study the phenomenon of \"cognitive offloading,\" where people delegate mental work to tools rather than performing it themselves.\n\nThe mounting costs of AI\nWebb believes that the reckoning with the costs of AI will happen as early as next year. She warns that while AI is cheap to get started with, the costs quickly compound and become \"shockingly uncomfortable.\" Despite the excitement surrounding AI, only a handful of companies have managed to create sustainable ways to experiment with AI, with few having figured out how to scale their pilots. The combination of pilot purgatory and the drowning in decks issue means that many executives are unsure how to deploy their newfound productivity gains, leading to a lack of clear direction on where to deploy those gains.",
  "summary": "Amy Webb is a futurist who called the rise of AI — and a U.S./China tech Cold War — years ago. She wishes she were happier with what she's seeing.",
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}