A recent Gartner consumer panel found that half of US adults prefer brands that don’t use generative AI, raising questions about the wisdom of investing heavily in this technology. Furthermore, a February 2026 NBER paper revealed that 90% of surveyed firms reported zero productivity impact from AI deployments, while an MIT GenAI study tracked 95% of corporate projects at zero ROI.

The numbers are just as stark at the platform level. Microsoft’s Copilot has lost 39% of its market share in six months, with users citing distrust of outputs as the leading reason. Wikipedia banned AI-generated articles in March, and Stack Overflow lost 78% of new-question volume in twelve months. The cURL bug bounty program was ended after AI-generated submissions overwhelmed its security team.

Additionally, Google AI Overviews have cut click-through rates by 58% on top-ranked pages, with 58% of all searches now ending in zero clicks. Publisher referral traffic is down 25% on average, 33% globally on news. These statistics suggest that the $750 billion investment in AI may not be yielding the desired results.

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