Big Business Taps The Brakes On AI As Human Skills Make A Comeback

New Census Bureau data show that after a surge in experimentation, Generative AI pilots have faltered across large firms, prompting renewed investment in human oversight and domain expertise.

Deutsche Bank called it “the summer AI turned ugly,” and there was certainly a heated war of words between Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei over the latter’s prediction that artificial intelligence would wipe out half of all white-collar jobs. The two executives spent much of the summer trading predictions about how many jobs would be lost as AI transformed the workforce in a “fourth industrial revolution.”

But from the standpoint of Labor Day, things are looking very different. Markets got a shock in late August from an unlikely place: a survey by MIT finding that 95% of generative AI pilots at large companies were failing. That prompted a tech sell-off and talk of whether AI was forming into a stock-market bubble. 

And another piece of the puzzle just fell into view: the Census Bureau finds that AI adoption rates are starting to decline among major firms. After two years of rapid experimentation and headline-grabbing pilot projects, many corporations appear to be reassessing the real-world value of integrating AI into their operations for the long haul.

Kelly Monahan is managing director of the Upwork Research Institute, where she is plugged into reams of data from the freelance market. In September, Upwork launched a new report into the hiring trends and skills that are most in demand. 

“What I’m seeing happening is the humans are coming back into the loop,” Monahan told Fortune. “We’re actually seeing the human skills coming into premium,” she said. “I think what people are realizing is even the best AI models still hallucinate 10% to 12% of the time.” 

“We just cannot necessarily overcome that statistical problem yet … I think what people are seeing, now that they’re using AI-generated content, is that they need fact-checking,” she added. Only a human can provide that.

The AI adoption decline figures come from the Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS), conducted biweekly by the U.S. Census Bureau, which covers more than 1.2 million firms and captures a unique, up-to-date view of technology adoption across different business sizes. 

The most recent data, reflected in a six-survey moving average, shows that the AI adoption rate among large companies — defined as those with more than 250 employees — has dipped from a peak of 14% earlier this year to 12% as of late summer 2025.

See the full article here: https://allwork.space/2025/09/big-business-taps-the-brakes-on-ai-as-human-skills-make-a-comeback/