Strategy · Andreessen Horowitz · Fortune Technology
Amy Webb was on her long Sunday bike ride, the one she takes when she’s not training for a race
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As she posted on LinkedIn recently: every CEO she talks to is buying abundance, and none are budgeting for the cost of abundance.
Key facts
- The pattern shows up in the data: A Bain & Company survey of 951 global companies published in June found that nearly 40% of companies that measured their AI cost savings landed below 10%, despite
- Webb, who speaks with between 100 and 150 CEOs a year, said she’s most focused on a bubble that sits apart from what’s happening on Wall Street: the strange way that AI is deforming work
- Webb, 51, runs the Future Today Strategy Group, the foresight and consulting firm she founded in 2006 after a career in data journalism that led to her subsequent interest in machine learning
- One of her clients had run 14 or 15 generative AI/agent pilots since the start of the year and used Amazon’s famous two-pizza rule, in which no team was big enough that it would take more than two
Summary
Amy Webb was on her long Sunday bike ride, the one she takes when she’s not training for a race, when the thought arrived fully formed. Webb, 51, runs the Future Today Strategy Group, the foresight and consulting firm she founded in 2006 after a career in data journalism that led to her subsequent interest in machine learning. So when Webb told Fortune that she sees something like a bust coming for corporate AI spending, it’s worth pausing on the precise dynamic she’s describing. “The best thing is to never get married,” Webb said, adding that she sees the same thing playing out in the endless series of generative AI pilots. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, meanwhile, said in March that large companies are overstaffed by as much as 75% and were using AI as a “silver bullet excuse” for cuts that reflect pandemic-era overhiring.