The Hype Check
AI hype is loud. AI adoption is silent.
Latest
-
I Shipped Production AI at Scale. Here Is What the Research Says Actually Drives Adoption.
A researcher who shipped 3 production AI platforms to 30,000 sellers in 2026 then quantified what drives adoption in 523 U.S. adults. Performance expectancy did not make the list. Three other factors did.
-
The Buy-or-Rent Compute Test. A New Standing Rubric, Applied to the Microsoft + NVIDIA Launch
This living article introduces the Buy-or-Rent Compute Test and applies it to the May 31 to June 1 Microsoft plus NVIDIA PC launch, where capability is clear but proof is still incomplete that buying hardware can reduce ongoing cloud spend.
-
KPMG at 276,000 Seats Is Real Readiness. It Is Not Value Closure Yet
The KPMG rollout is a credible enterprise readiness signal with one meaningful workflow-time disclosure, but program-level value evidence is still under-disclosed.
-
OpenAI Just Reframed Frontier AI Scores as a Setup Problem
OpenAI's new evaluation playbook says harness, budget, and validity checks can change results. That is a buyer warning, not just a safety note.
-
Cheaper Tokens Don't Close the Adoption-Value Gap
KPMG-Anthropic at workforce scale and Opus 4.8 at 61% lower token cost are real signals, not closure proof. The 88% vs ~5% gap lives at the outcome layer, not the input layer.
-
PwC's Second Announcement Had the Metrics, My First Verdict Missed Them
I collapsed two PwC announcements into one. This correction separates May 5 from May 14 and lands on a split verdict: compelling for the alliance, lukewarm for Advocate Health.
-
Starbucks Killed Automated Counting in 9 Months, and the Adoption-Value Gap Captured Itself
Starbucks rolled out NomadGo's computer-vision inventory tool across North America in September 2025, then retired it the week of May 18-22, 2026 and returned stores to manual counts. For the adoption-value gap, this is a rare named-buyer case where deployment and abandonment happened inside one observation window, making the gap visible without inference.
-
What Andy Crowder Actually Bought: A Three-Lever Read of the PwC-Advocate Health Deal
The May 14 PwC-Advocate Health expansion through the CX-as-ROI three-lever filter. Capacity is the lever pulled; cost-to-serve and customer-felt functionality remain claimed but unevidenced.
-
What Buyers Actually Said: Two Weeks of Vendor Noise vs. Named Evidence
Four W21-W22 announcement clusters scored by named-buyer evidence depth. Three lukewarm, one skip. The contrast that shows where decision quality fails.
-
Performance Expectancy Does Not Predict AI Adoption
A structural model of 523 U.S. adults found that performance expectancy had no statistically significant effect on AI adoption intent. The vendors pitching better capability specs are pulling the wrong lever. Here is what your deployment should be designed to pull instead.