The same Apollo Global Research partner, Torsten Slok, also published this widely cited story in September 2025 last year, "AI Adoption Rate Trending Down for Large Companies": https://www.apolloacademy.com/ai-adoption-rate-trending-down...

I don't think that one has held up very well. A cynic might opine that they've realized how easy it is to grab headlines and attention by putting out research that feeds people who are hungry for negative stories about AI.

UPDATE: I'm going to take this one back a a bit: it turns out Apollo publish articles like this on a daily basis, so the occasional headline that appeals to the "hungry for negative stories about AI" crowd is less of a pattern than if they published less frequently than that.

You’re implying that Apollo is biased, but the thing you’re quoting is a very brief report on publicly available research. This is the entirety of the article:

“The US Census Bureau conducts a biweekly survey of 1.2 million firms, and one question is whether a business has used AI tools such as machine learning, natural language processing, virtual agents or voice recognition to help produce goods or services in the past two weeks. Recent data by firm size shows that AI adoption has been declining among companies with more than 250 employees, see chart below.”

Two questions:

1) What does that chart show today? (Genuine question. I’m curious and don’t know where to find it.)

2) Regardless of what it shows now, why do you think Apollo reporting on it is noteworthy?

For being one of the biggest AI boosters on HN, you'd really think you could make a stronger case than "Apollo is bad because they observed and reported on a fact". It wasn't a prediction, so there's nothing to "hold up very well".

It was an accurate fit for the data, not a long term prediction.

I don’t think I’d judge someone offering a prediction the same way I’d judge an observation of what’s already happened. It’s implied that guesses about the future are uncertain in a way that statistics about the present are not.

> A cynic might opine that they've realized how easy it is to grab headlines and attention by putting out research that feeds people who are hungry for negative stories about AI.

This is kind of gross. Make the claim or not, don't do this pseudo-sealioning thing. Moreover, engage with the actual content (or you could just not engage at all!), not this shallowest possible dismissal.

A cynic might opine that an AI shill is not a great source of unbiased review of an article. The article is about a biweekly survey of companies and the trend was clearly dropping. This isn't about token use by tokenmaxxers increasing. And it isn't about the opinions of the folks you hang out with when you're flown to conferences to gush about AI. It's a survey of businesses. And aside from programming and math, AI sucks. Even in programming and math it's a tool with a lot of downsides.

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