Let me tell you something that the AI hype machine really does not want you to think about: the money is going in, but the results are not coming out.

A new survey of 6,000 executives across industries finds that more than 80% of companies report zero measurable productivity gains from their AI investments - despite the hundreds of billions being poured into the technology industry-wide. The survey, reported by Tom's Hardware, also found something perhaps even more telling: among the roughly one-third of leaders who do use AI tools at all, the average usage clocks in at just 90 minutes a week.

Let that number sink in. Ninety minutes a week. That is less time than most people spend in a single weekly planning meeting.

I spent four years building enterprise software before selling my company to Stripe, and I have seen this movie before. Not the AI chapter specifically, but the pattern. A technology gets overhyped, the C-suite buys the pitch, the check gets written - and then the actual humans who have to use the thing find workarounds, ignore it, or quietly abandon it because it does not fit how work actually happens. The gap between what a technology does in a controlled demo and what it does in your messy, legacy-laden real-world workflow is almost always enormous.

With AI, that gap appears to be Grand Canyon-sized.

To be fair, there are genuine productivity wins out there. Developers using tools like Copilot report measurable speed improvements for certain coding tasks. Legal teams doing contract review are seeing real time savings. Customer support operations are automating ticket triage at scale. The technology works - in narrow, well-defined contexts where the task is clear and the output can be easily verified.

The problem is that most knowledge work is not like that. Most of what executives and their employees actually do involves judgment calls, institutional context, and ambiguous information. These are precisely the areas where current AI struggles most and where hallucinations or confident-but-wrong outputs can cause real damage.