When the WRITER survey landed, LinkedIn knew exactly what to do with it.
Three out of four executives, 75%, admitting their company's AI strategy is "more for show" than real internal guidance. The takes wrote themselves. The emperor has no roadmap. They don't believe their own slides. Caught with their hands in the jar.
Easy read. Also wrong.
The clock problem
Technology adoption runs on decades. Capital markets run on ninety-day cycles. That gap is the whole story, and almost nobody is telling it.
Society had something like 250 years to build the institutions around the printing press: the courts, copyright law, the schools, the idea of an editor. Every general-purpose technology since got less runway. But the time to build real organizational capability around one of them is still measured in years, not quarters.
So picture the CEO who tells the board the honest thing: meaningful AI returns land in 2031, and between now and then we spend money and learn. That CEO is telling the truth, and the market punishes the truth this quarter. 73% of executives already report underwhelming returns. 48% call the whole effort a disappointment, up from 34% a year ago. And they still have to walk on stage in Q3 and sound certain.
So they perform. Not because they're frauds. Because the alternative gets them fired.
The performance is not a lie. It is an equilibrium.
What nobody performs
Here is the honest problem, and it isn't the executives.
The performance crowds out the work that actually pays. The enterprise data is blunt: 22% of companies report negative ROI at the twelve-month mark, and it's almost always scope creep, missing evals, no clear owner. Not the model.
None of that is performable. You cannot put "we finally wrote proper evals" on an earnings call. It doesn't photograph well. So it doesn't get the budget. The keynote gets the budget. The eval suite gets an intern. The system rewards the trailer and starves the film.
The honest version
The 75% number isn't evidence that executives are liars. It's evidence that we built a market that punishes honest timelines and rewards confident fiction. That's the structural story, and it's more uncomfortable than "CEOs lie," because you can't fix it by firing a CEO.
And here is the part that should bother you. The executives get to perform. They're fine. The cost lands somewhere else.
The same WRITER survey: 60% of companies plan to let go of employees who won't adopt AI. Meanwhile Ethan Mollick, who is not an AI pessimist, says the technology is not driving large-scale labor market changes yet, as of the end of 2025.
Read those two facts together. The performance has produced no measurable returns. And it already has a body count.
The show goes on. Someone else is paying for the tickets.
— Pan