AI Economy Bubble: Why Corporate AI Spending Mirrors a Bad Dating App

Why the AI economy feels like a broken dating app

Amy Webb, the futurist behind The Big Nine, warns that the AI economy is entering a phase of over‑optimism, with CEOs chasing cheap production while hidden costs balloon.

During a routine Sunday bike ride, Webb realized that every chief executive she consults is “buying abundance” without budgeting for the downstream price tag. She tells Reuters that corporate AI pilots have stalled in a “pilot purgatory,” delivering impressive speed but no clear path to scale.

“It feels like you’re getting a lot when you invest in AI, but that abundance ends up costing much more down the road,” Webb said.

Venture capitalists echo the sentiment. Marc Andreessen recently claimed large firms are over‑staffed by as much as ↑ 75%, using AI as a “silver‑bullet” excuse for layoffs that largely never materialize. An Oxford Economics study found AI‑linked cuts accounted for only ↓ 4.5% of U.S. job losses.

Deck overload and decision fatigue

Executives report “insta‑decks”: presentations that once took a week now arrive in a day, yet the volume has multiplied fivefold. The result is decision paralysis, not from lack of data but from an avalanche of AI‑generated slides, many of which are overly verbose – Claude, for example, often spits out ten pages when one would suffice.

Webb asks CEOs a simple question: if AI freed 10% of total capacity tomorrow, where would that extra bandwidth go? The answer is usually “nowhere.” Companies are prioritising speed over the creation of new strategic thinking, leaving productivity gains unharvested.

Psychologists label this “cognitive offloading.” When machines handle core reasoning, employees feel less ownership of the output, a trend visible in Hollywood’s AI‑creativity debates. From a bottom‑line view, AI is cheap to adopt, but the integration costs – legal, IT, change‑management – compound rapidly.

Webb predicts a reckoning as early as next year. The “second chapter” will surface when Wall Street demands measurable returns from the dozens of generative‑AI pilots. She cautions that this is not a classic dot‑com bubble; the hidden expense of “abundance” could trigger a correction that reshapes corporate strategy.

Dispatch from: Roman Vance

Contracted Global Reporter
(Note: Roman Vance is covering this desk while Julian Reed is on sick leave.)