15,000 Cuts and a 95% Failure Rate
Episode notes
We just spent $300 billion building a car nobody taught anyone to drive.
Q1 2026. The four largest venture rounds in history all closed in a single quarter. 80% of capital went to AI companies. Oracle cut an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people in one day and redirected the savings toward data centers.
AI is now the number-one reason companies are cutting jobs in the US. 15,000 cuts in March alone.
At the same time...
Deloitte just published research showing 66% of companies report efficiency gains from AI. Only 20% have seen actual revenue growth. 95% of pilot projects show no immediate ROI.
Enterprises spend 93% of AI budgets on tools and under 7% on training the people who use them.
No strategy. No enablement. Just tools.
Companies are buying AI like it's a vending machine. Put money in, get transformation out. But that has never been how technology works. Not with cloud. Not with AI.
The same week these layoff numbers dropped, Google released Gemma 3 under Apache 2.0. Free to use. Free to modify. Free to deploy commercially. The tools have never been more accessible.
Access was never the bottleneck. Adoption is.
#AI #FutureOfWork #TheHumanInTheLoop