Now that attention within the AI revolution has one again firmly turned toward the cost-benefit equation (i..e., ROI) of tokens (see "From Singularity To Tokenomics: The AI Narrative Just Hit A Serious Snag") in particular, and the trillions behind the AI spending rollout in general, and we say once again because every few months we get some iteration of the following report from Goldman published almost two years ago today...
... we have more bad news: according to a global survey by Bain, cost savings from automation are broadly falling short of projections. Which means that those expecting big savings from their investments in artificial intelligence, which is most companies, will be disappointed.
The missed targets “should be making executives uncomfortable,” since many of them are approving increased spending for artificial intelligence on the basis of expected savings, the consulting firm said in a report shared exclusively with Bloomberg News. The problem is there are little actual savings to speak of.
The survey, completed in April, was based on responses from executives at 951 companies with more than $100 million in revenue, across nine sectors: retail, technology, advanced manufacturing, healthcare, consumer products, energy, financial services, telecom/media/entertainment and insurance.
It found that among companies measuring their AI cost savings, the largest share (40%) realized reductions of 10% or less. Predictably, most had been expecting to see far more meaningful improvement, especially since they spent far more than that on the new technology.
Here’s the part that Bain found the most troubling: 44% of large companies that are funding their next wave of AI spending are basing those investments on the last round of savings - savings that haven’t yet materialized.
“The prior wave underdelivered. The savings pool is smaller than assumed,” Bain warned. “And the investment case for the current wave was sized against projections rather than actuals.” Kinda like the bubble in AI forward earnings: based on projections - which as any intern can tell you can flip on a dime - rather than actuals.
“Self-funding the next wave from past returns sounds like discipline. In reality, it is a circular bet with a structural leak,” the firm cautioned, and concluded that "The technology worked. The value didn’t arrive."
Whether driven by hope or FOMO or a blend of both, the AI boom is exposing divides between promise and reality. An MIT research report last year showed that 95% of corporate AI pilots fall flat and concluded that the “primary factor keeping organizations on the wrong side of the GenAI Divide is the learning gap, tools that don't learn, integrate poorly, or match workflows.”
So Bain’s latest survey wasn’t the first evidence of AI underdelivering so far on expectations. And it’s not likely the last either.
But the Bain report isolated a different problem: “Despite a decade of investments in data modernization running well into hundreds of billions of dollars globally, the No. 1 reason AI programs underperform is that companies cannot reliably get access to their own data,” Bain said.
“Companies that don’t validate their reinvestment math against what automation actually returned, rather than what it was supposed to return, are compounding risk rather than managing it” the Bain report concluded, confirming what many have already sensed: virtually nobody has done effective ROI analysis amid a technological rollout that has already soaked up more than $1 trillion in capital, the return on which appears to be modest at best.
Bain's prescription: Instead of waiting to structure all of their data to make it ingestible by AI, companies should start with what’s available to feed into the models, and then use AI to help sort out how to structure the rest.
Meanwhile, companies that were meeting their savings targets reported running into barriers with data structure and accessibility at even higher rates than those missing their targets, but they were less likely to report organizational challenges such as insufficient budgets or competing priorities.
Adding fuel to the fire, a comparable report from Gartner found that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, due to escalating costs, unclear business value or inadequate risk controls.
“Most agentic AI projects right now are early stage experiments or proof of concepts that are mostly driven by hype and are often misapplied,” said Anushree Verma, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner. “This can blind organizations to the real cost and complexity of deploying AI agents at scale, stalling projects from moving into production. They need to cut through the hype to make careful, strategic decisions about where and how they apply this emerging technology.”
As such, Gartner recommends agentic AI only be pursued where it delivers clear value or ROI, noting that "Integrating agents into legacy systems can be technically complex, often disrupting workflows and requiring costly modifications. In many cases, rethinking workflows with agentic AI from the ground up is the ideal path to successful implementation."
“To get real value from agentic AI, organizations must focus on enterprise productivity, rather than just individual task augmentation,” said Verma. “They can start by using AI agents when decisions are needed, automation for routine workflows and assistants for simple retrieval. It’s about driving business value through cost, quality, speed and scale.”
The problem, it now appears, is that virtually nobody has done an actual ROI analysis. But with token costs now soaring...
... the time has finally arrived, and as enterprises pull back in horror from the "great promise" of the agentic black hole, one can easily understand why both OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which are extrapolating their burst in agentic revenue in perpetuity, are rushing to go public before the market once again does the ROI math.
Tyler Durden Tue, 06/02/2026 - 21:50Authored by Mollie Engelhart via The Epoch Times,
Do we really believe in freedom?
Or do we only believe in freedom when it applies to people who agree with us?
Do we trust people we fundamentally disagree with to remain free citizens?
Or do we believe they must be controlled through laws, censorship, surveillance, or social pressure because they are too dangerous to be trusted with liberty?
That question sits at the center of what I am most interested in during this moment in history, the 250th year of the American experiment.
Because when I look around, it increasingly feels like both sides are drifting in the same direction while packaging it differently.
Each side frames the other as dangerous, radical, and incapable of self-governance. People on the left often believe the right is racist, authoritarian, anti-science, and driven by extremism. Many people on the right believe the left is hostile to faith, hostile to biology, hostile to free speech, and willing to use institutions to socially engineer society.
If you genuinely believe those things about your political opponents, then freedom starts to feel dangerous.
And once freedom feels dangerous, control starts to feel justified.
For me, the COVID-19 pandemic broke the illusion.
I suddenly realized I could no longer clearly see what the political left still offered someone like me. I watched censorship expand rapidly. I watched speech become conditional. I watched people lose jobs and platforms for asking questions. I watched mandates imposed alongside liability protections and dissent treated as danger.
I watched mandates destroy livelihoods.
I watched small businesses close while major corporations consolidated wealth and power. I watched people who had spent decades building restaurants, gyms, farms, salons, and family businesses suddenly deemed “nonessential.”
I wasn’t reading about these policies. I was living under them.
At the same time, I was living in a state that increasingly felt hostile to the practical realities of my life. Everything started feeling harder. More permits. More taxes. More hoops. More social pressure. It felt harder to make a living, harder to farm, harder to build, harder to protect my family, and harder to simply live outside institutional approval.
Socially, it also became harder to honestly say what I believed without risking professional or personal consequences.
This week, I heard arguments celebrating the fact that Democrats overwhelmingly voted against liability protections for chemical companies accused of poisoning Americans. Many people presented that as evidence that one side cares about ordinary people while the other protects corporations from accountability.
But that moral high ground becomes more complicated when you remember that many of those same political voices supported mandating a vaccine under an emergency authorization, with liability protections already built into the system. At the same time, dissent around those policies was aggressively silenced.
And the reality is that we are still learning about the long-term effects, trade-offs, and consequences years later.
That is not a conspiracy theory.
That is simply how medicine and biology work. Scientific understanding evolves over time.
The George Floyd era accelerated another version of this same instinct.
Suddenly, institutions across America were pressured to publicly demonstrate ideological “purity” around race, gender, identity, and social justice. Diversity, equity, Indigenous representation, and LGBTQ+ inclusion became not just social values but institutional litmus tests in many professional environments.
In some cases, executives, journalists, professors, and employees lost their positions not because they had committed crimes or acts of hatred, but because they failed to meet ideological expectations during a moment of intense cultural pressure.
And once again, people became afraid to say the wrong thing out loud.
But now I watch similar instincts emerge from the political right under different circumstances.
There are increasingly subjects people feel afraid to discuss openly because they fear losing jobs, reputations, platforms, or financial access. Concerns about extremism, hate speech, anti-Semitism, immigration, terrorism, and national security are all increasingly used to justify expanded speech restrictions and surveillance powers.
And to be fair, some of those fears are real.
But history shows that societies rarely surrender freedom all at once. Usually, it happens piece by piece, each side justifying control because they believe the other side is simply too dangerous to remain fully free.
Many people argued I should have stayed and fought politically where I was. But I didn’t.
I moved to Central Texas. Honestly, I needed to breathe a little.
And yet, even now, as I watch the country continue to fracture, I try very hard not to become tribal myself. I try to zoom out and see the bigger picture.
At the core of it, I still believe in freedom.
But that realization leads me to an uncomfortable conclusion: If I truly believe in freedom, then I have to believe the people around me deserve freedom, too—even when I deeply disagree with them.
Otherwise, what I’m actually asking for is not freedom, but power for my side and restriction for theirs.
Maybe the real test of a free society is not whether we support freedom for people we agree with.
Maybe the real test is whether we still support it when we don’t agree with each other.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
Tyler Durden Tue, 06/02/2026 - 21:45Leftists often claim that when someone of celebrity status appears with Donald Trump, it gives Trump "legitimacy." This is the common rationale they use to justify their insane cult-like behavior - Their habit of using mobs of mindless activist zombies in order to frighten people with status away from openly identifying as conservative. The truth is, the political left is a paper tiger, an astroturf movement with no power, blustering with false bravado.
In reality, celebrities do not give Trump legitimacy. His landslide election victory gives him legitimacy.
The radical left is a one trick pony, constantly repeating the same lies and exaggerations in the belief that if they lie long enough those lies will eventually become part of the popular zeitgeist. For example, a white sports star has a positive interaction with Trump and the progressive media conjures a narrative that he is alienating his minority team mates because shaking hands with Trump is the same as shaking hands with "racism."
This tiresome strategy is being used once again on New York Giants quarterback Jaxson Dart after he appeared on stage with Trump at a New York political rally. Leftist journalists assert that Dart shaking hands with Trump is the same as shaking hands with Hitler. The engineered controversy led to a couple of the QB's teammates expressing discomfort over the event.
Thankfully, the opinions of Dart's teammates are meaningless and he has every right to stand on stage with whoever he pleases. At present, it seems as though other Giants players understand that they don't have to align politically in order to play a football game.
Linebacker Abdul Carter (a Muslim) initially voiced discomfort with the optics of the event, according to multiple reports. Dart said he discussed the issue directly with Carter and brushed off any rumors about beef between the two players. For those who don't like Dart's promotional appearances, frankly they can shut up and stew in their salty snowflake juices about it.
The media, though, is never going to shut up about it because their job is to create controversy out of thin air.
Some outlets think Dart needs to be cancelled (as if the political left has any power to cancel anyone anymore). Sports media site SB Nation claims that Dart's freedom to meet publicly with Trump does not mean he has the freedom to avoid "criticism" (persecution). It's the same incessant woke argument of "cancel culture vs consequence culture."
Their version of events displays an insufferable seething; something that might have been more familiar back in 2020. One has to wonder, do these people ever grow out of their childish delusions of grandeur? And the answer is no, no they do not. But we still examine such left-wing crash-outs because they give us insight into the thought processes of progressive authoritarians. As SB Nation asserts:
"Freedom is pretty great, isn’t it? Here in the United States we love to talk about freedom. The people who love to talk about it the most, who bathe in the idea of American exceptionalism, tend to be those who rarely (if ever) travel abroad. They love to speak about the world in platitudes, always through the lens that the God-loving USA is free, and nowhere else is. It’s a refrain the majority of Western foreigners find hilarious. Folks in the U.K? They’re free. Europe? Free as well. Australia, Canada, New Zealand — yeah, they’re free.
There are 20 nations broadly recognized as having freedom of expression, with the USA ranking third behind Denmark and Norway. Sure, all those nations might not let you brandish a firearm in public or hurl hate speech at people — but denying that doesn’t make them “un-free.”"
Yes, it does make those countries unfree. If any viewpoints including the truth can be labeled "hate speech", then the populace does not have free speech. If the government can put people in prison over jokes and online memes, then those people are not free. In the UK, around 12,000 people each year are arrested for using restricted speech online. Most of these arrests are for basic and factual criticisms relating to mass immigration and migrant crime.
This is not freedom.
The US is the only country in the world with freedom of speech codified into constitutional law. It is the only country in the world where the government is restricted from making laws referencing public speech. SB Nation uses their false narrative of "speech vs hate speech" to launch into their attack on Jaxson Dart. This is how these people rationalize their totalitarian behavior. SB Nation continues:
"We’re having this discussion on a sports website because sports are, and always have been, inherently political. It’s impossible to divorce the two, as much as you might want them to be separate..."
For the political left, everything is political. From movies to TV shows to commercials to video games to comic books to beauty pageants to sports. Leftist activists believe they should control the platforms of famous people and exploit those platforms for propaganda. When a celebrity steps out of line, the struggle session begins.
During the Biden Administration normal people could not escape left-wing politics because they injected their woke ideology into everything. Sports are not political in the slightest, but progressive movements have tried to force wokeness into them at every turn.
"Dart made a choice by grinning on stage with the sitting president, one who happens to be historically unpopular, the most divisive in modern history, and largely reviled in both New York and New Jersey, the states the New York Giants represent.
Dart was absolutely free to introduce Trump, he’s free to support him - and personally, I don’t want to see him lose his job for exercising his freedom. That crucially doesn’t mean Dart should be free of any criticism or allowed to dance away from his decision..."
A classic woke deflection: "We don't want to see this man cancelled, but he should be cancelled..." At no point do the people at SBN explain why it's a bad thing for a Giants QB to meet with Donald Trump, other than leftists in New York "don't like Trump" and they think Trump is vaguely racist, even though they can't come up with a single legitimate example of racism.
"Dart has spoken as well, but limited his remarks on the appearance to a pre-written statement and has not taken any questions. Even in an instance where a white athlete started the drama, it’s become incumbent upon his black teammates to answer the lion’s share of questions about their teammate. Unfortunately, this is par for the course..."
Trump's policies have nothing to do with Jaxson Dart. The man is not political and his views are not up for scrutiny simply because he likes a President that leftists hate. Jaxson Dart does not answer to The View. He does not answer to SB Nation. He does not have to answer to his teammates, and his teammates don't have to answer to the media.
As much as the activist mob might want to make Dart pay for escaping the liberal plantation, none of them has the power to do anything to him. There comes a point when leftists need to accept that they are impotent. Their cancel culture heyday is long gone and the culture of sane normality is leaving them far behind.
Tyler Durden Tue, 06/02/2026 - 21:20