How AI Euphoria Is Undermining Corporate Governance

Developer and blogger Simon Willison drew attention to a piece by consultant Nick Suresh about how the widespread obsession with artificial intelligence is shaping managerial decisions at the large corporations he works with.

The text is built on anonymous anecdotes from the author's sources. In one case, a senior executive admitted that he had never once used ChatGPT or any other AI tool — even though shortly beforehand he himself had presented a technical strategy for an organization with over $2 billion in revenue, built entirely around artificial intelligence.

Another example concerns an engineer at a company that had introduced a peculiar “leaderboard” for AI token usage. According to him, he set up a parallel copy of the working Go repository and had the AI rewrite it entirely in Zig — simply to formally keep up the appearance of actively using neural networks and not lose his job.

Willison was particularly intrigued by an account of a conversation with a skeptically inclined manager at one of these excessively AI-enthusiastic companies. Asked why claims about AI's incredible effectiveness are repeated without objection, the interlocutor replied that it was not just a matter of marketing exaggerations aimed at an impressionable audience. The key reason is that the clients themselves publicly declare a hundredfold increase in productivity thanks to AI, and if a vendor's representative were to publicly cast doubt on the realism of such figures, it would be perceived as undermining the authority of the client company's executive and almost as an attack on him — which risks resulting in the termination of the contract.

Thus, according to the author's observations, the hype around AI creates a vicious circle: doubting the inflated expectations becomes disadvantageous for the implementers, for the technology vendors, and for the executives themselves, who have publicly staked their reputations on AI.

Source: Simon Willison