(The Epoch Times)—The artificial intelligence (AI) gold rush has reached American businesses, but despite billions being spent, many companies aren’t seeing a return on their investment in the emerging technology.
The United States is the world’s leading investor in AI technologies. Tech giants such as Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have led the way in private sector investment and announced more than $100 billion in additional AI expenditures this year.
An analysis from CMS developer Storyblok noted that eCommerce businesses are spending, on average, nearly $400,000 on AI solutions for enhanced customer service experiences. However, only 32 percent reported even a “slight improvement” in operations resulting from their AI investment.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) published research showing that despite U.S. companies spending upwards of $40 billion on AI investments, 95 percent have seen zero monetary return.
The study found that only 5 percent of integrated AI pilot programs are producing millions of dollars worth of value. Businesses stuck in the start-up phase of integration suffer what AI developer and vice president of Vapor IO, Kamil Mansuri, called “magic wand” thinking.
“Companies stuck in pilot hell usually have three issues: unclear success metrics, trying to solve everything at once, and treating AI as the goal instead of the solution,” Mansuri told The Epoch Times.
Mansuri said the MIT study findings didn’t surprise him because, in his experience, companies tend to treat AI like a magic wand instead of a tool for specific problems. Mansuri said the best way to avoid this pitfall is to steer clear of what he called “vague AI transformation.”
“At Vapor IO, we saw real ROI [return on investment] because we targeted concrete use cases like infrastructure optimization and automated failover systems,” Mansuri said.
“The difference is focus …. We cut cloud spend from $1.5 [million] to $800,000 by using AI for resource optimization because we knew exactly what problem we were solving.”
Mansuri believes the key to monetary return on AI investments comes from starting small and choosing an area with a measurable impact.
“The companies seeing results pick one specific pain point, prove value there, then expand,” he said.
Trial and Error
Mansuri is among many trying to peel back the corporate hype to expose what lies behind the investment-returns gap: a disconnect between integration and workflows. The MIT report also pointed to a lack of feedback loops or a misalignment with individual business needs.
“We invested a significant amount of money in making use of AI at Ranko Media and, overall, replacing humans didn’t work at all. Enabling our team to produce more output is where we found the best ROI,” Nick Rubright, CEO of Ranko Media, told The Epoch Times.
“For example, we create lots of content for our clients … We tried to automate content with AI, but the problem for us was that in GEO [generative search optimization] and SEO [search engine optimization], it’s winner-take-all. So we had to go back to leveraging human writers with real-world subject matter expertise because we needed to create content that would be competitive on the internet,” Rubright said.
He added that his company still uses AI to create content, but only the tools that are useful to his workforce and with the specific goal of expediting repetitive tasks.
By taking the focused integration versus human replacement approach, Rubright said AI has significantly improved his company’s content profitability.
“We make about 4x margin on content now, and the performance of that content has improved significantly across the board. I think it’s because humans have instinct from prior experience, but AI just sort of does what everyone else is doing and uses data, not experience,” he said.
Rubright also believes executives who view AI as a cheap replacement for human labor likely won’t see the returns they expect.
“There’s a lot of talk about AI being a human replacement, and lots of AI startups claim their tools can replace workers, but I’ve never found this to be true because these new tools still need management,” he said.
The phenomenon of high AI-tool adoption and low industry disruption rates is something the MIT report observed across 300 publicly disclosed AI projects, interviews with 52 organizations, and responses from 153 senior leaders at four key industry conferences.
So far, industries showing the most successful AI transformation include telecommunications and professional services.
The report also noted that established large language model AI programs such as ChatGPT have higher rates of successful corporate deployment than their custom-made counterparts. Many of the failed attempts to integrate custom AI tools into businesses were attributed to “brittle workflows, lack of contextual learning, and misalignment with day-to-day operations.”
Mansuri said he sees three main barriers come up regularly for companies struggling to get a return on their AI investment.
“First, data quality. You can’t build reliable AI on messy data. Companies rush to implement models without cleaning up their data infrastructure first. This is like trying to cook gourmet meals with spoiled ingredients,” he said.
The second one he noticed is unrealistic expectations at the executive level. Mansuri said many CEOs expect to see an “immediate transformation” after sinking money into AI technologies.
Finally, he said, many leadership teams try to retrofit existing roles instead of hiring people who actually understand both the tech and the business applications.
“You need engineers who can bridge the mercurial gap between cutting-edge AI capabilities and practical business value,” Mansuri said.
Fixing Bottlenecks
Starting small and having clarity around what AI tools are being used for has helped many business owners steer clear of an investment sinkhole, experts said.
“We’ve seen tangible ROI from AI because we started small and applied it to specific bottlenecks rather than chasing a big project,” Eric Turney, president of custom product manufacturing firm The Monterey Company, told The Epoch Times.
Turney said his company uses AI to generate SEO-optimized content and streamline customer responses, which has significantly reduced their cost per lead and improved lead response times.
“Unlike companies that stall, we’ve turned AI into a revenue driver by tying it directly to measurable outcomes,” he said.
Nick Strada, the founder of ad agency Bruiser Creative, is also seeing a fast return on his AI investment because he put it into production immediately. It has paid for itself, even with big projects.
“AI tools aren’t lab toys, they’re embedded in workflows that affect both cost and revenue,” Strada told The Epoch Times.
He said on the cost side, automation through AI tools has saved money on labor hours with tasks such as parsing briefs, scraping campaign data, and generating research reports. In terms of revenue generation, Strada said his company is seeing returns there, too.
He used a recent example of when a client came to his company with a seemingly impossible schedule and modest budget, which AI was able to help solve.
“By combining human craft with AI-enhanced workflows, including image generation, scaling tools, [and] automated asset preparation, we produced work that reached Cannes Lions scale. That success generated new client opportunities and reinforced relationships,” he said.
Strada said reaping the rewards from smart AI investments isn’t a theoretical concept: “It shows up as reduced operational overhead, new project wins, and the ability to make ideas come to life in ways that were previously not possible.”
Turney said successful AI integration in a business requires clarity on its place within the company workflow.
In his experience, Turney has noticed “companies often overinvest in experimental tools or broad strategies, but fail to integrate AI into their daily operations with accountability effectively.”
He said another corporate pitfall is treating AI like a “magic bullet,” rather than continually refining its role.
Mansuri said the formula for successful AI investment is simple: Industries with clear, measurable processes see faster returns. For example, he said logistics and supply chain optimization manifest revenue quickly because route planning and inventory management have direct cost savings that can be measured in real-time.
Alternatively, Mansuri said industries that are heavily regulated, such as health care, can take longer to show returns on AI investment.
“Industries with quantifiable processes and clear success metrics see faster ROI than those with subjective or heavily regulated outcomes,” Mansuri said.
In a March report, Morgan Stanley noted many company executives are optimistic about seeing a return on their AI investments amid rosy forecasts of hundreds of millions in profit gains over the next few years.
However, the investment bank tempered this enthusiasm by acknowledging that AI-investments with long-run payoff are challenging to identify.
“AI adopters are already outperforming the broader market,” Andrew Pauker, a director at Morgan Stanley Equity Research, said in a statement.
“Companies discussing AI adoption have been rewarded in fourth-quarter earnings.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.