AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making
Simon Willison · Simon Willison · 2026-07-19
Consultant Nik Suresh documents how AI mania is distorting corporate decision-making, with executives setting AI strategy without ever having used AI tools and engineers gaming productivity leaderboards to protect their jobs.
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Extraction
Topics: ai-hypecorporate-ai-adoptionorganizational-decision-makingproductivity-metrics
Claims
- At least one executive produced an AI-centered technical strategy for a $2B+ revenue organization without ever having used ChatGPT or any AI tool.
- Engineers at some companies are running AI rewrites of codebases in the background solely to inflate token usage leaderboards, not to produce useful output.
- A culture of silence suppresses honest assessment of AI productivity claims because contradicting an executive's 100x productivity claims risks enterprise contract cancellations.
- The dominant force sustaining unrealistic AI productivity claims is financial incentive alignment between vendor and customer executives, not genuine belief.
Key quotes
I have seen an executive confess that they had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life, immediately after producing a technical strategy for an organisation with $2B+ in revenue which was entirely centered around AI.
Checking out a parallel copy of our Go repository and telling the AI to rewrite the whole thing in Zig while I work on something else just so I can keep my job.
Executives at their customers were saying absurd things about achieving 100x productivity, and this meant that if any executive at the vendor said that these gains were not plausible, it would undermine the credibility of the customer's executive, be perceived as an attack (or heresy), and possibly result in an enterprise contract cancellation.