MIT report crashes AI companies' shares: 95% of AI investments don't pay off
A high-profile MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) report on the real state of affairs with artificial intelligence has sharply cooled Wall Street's enthusiasm. The document entitled The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025 showed that the promised "gold rush" from generative AI has not yet brought tangible benefits to most companies.
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The study is based on 150 interviews with top executives, a survey of 350 employees and an analysis of 300 public AI implementations. The picture is bleak: less than 10% of pilot projects yielded any increase in revenue. And only 5% of implementations bring really big money - the other 95% did not give the business any return at all.
No wonder the stock market got nervous on Tuesday. Nvidia shares fell 3.5%, Arm Holdings lost 3.8%, and Palantir plummeted nearly 9% and continues to sag.
According to Aditya Challapally, author of the report, the problem lies not so much in the models themselves, but in the fact that companies do not know how to apply them correctly. He noted that young startups focused on solving one specific problem and working in partnership with customers show a completely different result: some have grown from zero to $20 million in revenue in just one year.
MIT also found that businesses are investing money in the wrong places: more than half of AI budgets are spent on marketing and sales, while the real revenue comes from "boring" automation - optimising the back office and not outsourcing processes. At the same time, specialised external tools work in 67% of cases, while in-house development succeeds in only a third of projects.
Udo J. Keppler, "Wall Street bubbles are always the same" (1901). Illustration: Puck magazine
Adding to the nervousness were the words of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who a few days ago warned of an emerging "AI bubble." According to him, "some investors will lose a lot of money, but in the long run, society will still benefit."
Meta wasn't left out either - its shares went down after news of the AI division's restructuring. All of this only increases doubts about whether the hype around artificial intelligence has become dangerously overheated.