The AI Hype Train

The AI Hype Train

By Kipp April 13, 2026

AI is genuinely remarkable, heck I used it to make this awesome AI Hype image in seconds. But I have seen these waves of technology for over 20 years. That’s exactly why I need to say this.

Gartner just dropped data that should give every executive pause: 50% of organizations that cut jobs citing AI, will be rehiring by 2027. Only 20% of companies actually reduced headcount because of AI. And 50% of generative AI projects are abandoned after proof of concept.

I’m not surprised. I’ve lived this cycle before, with “The Cloud”, “Big Data”, heck I am old enough to remember the “.com”

Here’s what I’ve watched happen, multiple times:
An executive approaches the need for AI, not with a problem to solve, but with a mandate to appear innovative. “We need to be using AI.” Full stop. No use case. No success metric. No understanding of what adoption even looks like for their specific business. Just the repeated information that they get from the Microsoft’s and other tech giants (which all benefit from our premature adoption).

Then comes the org chart changes. The title reshuffles. The layoffs framed as “AI-driven optimization.” Announced before a single workflow has been validated. And when the ROI doesn’t materialize, because it rarely does when you lead with the press release instead of the problem, those same organizations quietly start rehiring.

Don’t be that organization.
The companies that will actually win with AI are the ones doing the boring, unglamorous work right now:
– Identifying specific problems AI can meaningfully address
– Running real pilots with honest success criteria
– Letting adoption data drive structural decisions, not the other way around

AI isn’t a strategy. It’s a tool. A powerful one.

Before you restructure, before you eliminate roles, before you make any irreversible decision with “AI” in the justification, confirm the adoption.

Confirm the value. Confirm it solves something real for your people and your customers. The hype will pass. The organizations that moved deliberately will still be standing.

The ones that chased the narrative? They’ll be in the next Gartner statistic.