For the past few years, the AI industry has been charging full steam ahead, in what can sometimes feel like a pell-mell mad dash to take over the world. Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, the industry has leveraged an ever-expanding arsenal of political, cultural, and economic power in its effort to lay claim to many different parts of society. Yet, despite the AI industry’s attempts to make itself seem omnipresent, a new report this week shows that adoption at large U.S. companies has declined.
The report comes from the Census Bureau and shows that the rate of AI adoption by large companies—that is, firms with over 250 employees—has been declining slightly in recent weeks. The report is based on a biweekly survey, dubbed Business Trends and Outlook (or BTOS), of some 1.2 million U.S. firms. The survey, which asks businesses about their use of AI tools, such as machine learning and agents, found that—between June and now—the rate of adoption had declined from 14 to 12 percent. Futurism notes that this is the largest drop-off in the adoption rate since the survey first began in 2023, although the survey also showed a slight increase in AI use among smaller companies.
The moderate drop off comes after the rate of adoption had climbed precipitously over the last few years. When the survey first began, in September of 2023, the AI adoption rate hovered around 3.7 percent, while the adoption rate in December 2024 was around 5.7 percent. In the second quarter of this year, the rate also rose significantly, climbing from 7.4 percent to 9.2.
The new drop-off in reported usage comes not long after another study, this one published by MIT, found that a vast majority of corporate AI pilot programs had failed to produce any material benefit to the companies involved.
While it’s hard to tell much from the findings of two disparate reports, it certainly doesn’t depict AI as the unstoppable force its proponents hope it is. It could even suggest that AI is less a vital corporate tool and more a trendy bauble that companies don’t quite know what to do with. In other words, the ongoing chatter about AI being a bubble that is due to burst may have newfound relevance sooner rather than later.