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There are plenty of reasons to believe artificial intelligence will be slower than its biggest boosters believe, but faster than the skeptics say

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It has been barely 1,200 days since OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT. Yet, if you believe the most extreme artificial-intelligence boosters, the technology should have transformed the business world already. (Or it will do so any day now.) It is just as easy to find critics who think AI is just the latest tech fad that is doomed to fizzle before it achieves anything. That, too, is going to happen any day now.

The truth is more complicated than either the hype or its critics allow. Step inside a large company today, and AI is everywhere and nowhere at once. Employees use it to summarize meetings, draft emails and generate first cuts of presentations. But those gains haven’t yet translated into a clear, economywide productivity surge—or fundamental changes to how people do their jobs.

So, how long will it take AI to reach its potential? Figuring it out means sorting through a lot of challenges facing the business world: institutional inertia, human resistance to change, limited and often just plain messy data, privacy and security concerns, and the imaginative leap required to redesign how organizations actually function.

It is an out-of-focus picture. But even though it isn’t as sharp as we’d like, it can tell us a lot about where we stand and how far we have to go.

For all the grumbling and negative news, AI is making strides in the business world. surveys of CIOs and CEOs consistently show that companies plan to spend more on AI this year and next. A research report Deloitte released in January, and a separate Wharton study, both show large companies moving beyond experimentation and integrating AI into essential operations. The Wharton study, released in the fall, also found that three-quarters of the 801 executives surveyed reported positive returns on their AI investments.

The gains are showing up across a range of industries. Retailers are leaning on AI for real-time pricing and product recommendations. Private-equity firms have built AI analysts that synthesize research and inform investment decisions. Manufacturers are deploying computer vision to catch defects on the production line.

The most dramatic progress has been in software development. AI has become so capable at writing code that many software engineers simply describe what they want in plain English and the AI does the rest.

Given all that, it is flat-out wrong to say that AI adoption is stagnating, says Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor who studies how companies adopt AI. “Saying we’re stuck in pilot mode is this outdated idea that’s wrong,” he says. “I’m talking to companies all the time getting real value out of AI.”

But the AI revolution is up against many obstacles in the business world. For one thing, there is basic skepticism about all the hype: Boards and investors keep pushing for clearer evidence that AI investment is paying off. And, so far at least, AI hasn’t shown that it is versatile enough to transform businesses and industries on a large scale.

Researchers have coined a term to describe AI’s uneven capabilities: “jagged frontier.” The models are great at some things and surprisingly bad at others, and it is rarely obvious which is which until after a company has already committed, says Benedict Evans, an independent analyst who tracks enterprise AI adoption.

For instance, AI excels at tasks with clear structures such as coding, legal-document review and financial analysis. But ask AI to navigate the more-contextual work that fills most of a workday, and the jaggedness shows. It gives wrong answers with great confidence, and can’t draw on the human factors—judgment calls, unwritten rules and hard-won instincts—that never make it into training data.

That is a hard ceiling on what present-day AI can do. “Whether you’re a CEO, a manager, a journalist, a professor or a construction worker, I see your skills as beyond what AI can perform,” says Nobel laureate and MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, who says he believes current AI tools will have an impact on only a fraction of jobs.

What’s more, to actually do something useful, AI needs a lot of “wrapping”: the right data, the right permissions, the right guardrails and defined roles for the humans who oversee it. Because every company’s systems and workflows are different, that surrounding architecture usually has to be built from scratch. And that is a lot harder than it looks.

But as obstacles go, the technological issues may be much easier to overcome than the human ones. Simply put, a lot of people need to be convinced before the AI revolution can happen in earnest.

Executives face five-year planning cycles, depreciation schedules on systems they bought three years ago, and boards demanding returns. Risk aversion in that environment isn’t irrational. Then there are the workers: People who believe they are training their own replacements aren’t going to be enthusiastic partners in making it work.

“What is being sold is this idea of productivity and efficiency,” says Kate Brennan, associate director of the AI Now Institute, an AI-policy research center, “and what that means for the people doing the actual work is rarely part of the conversation.”

Management and employees can also be hesitant about really integrating AI into their operations, rather than just using it for drudgework. People’s instinct is to use AI to automate parts of existing processes rather than rethink the processes themselves.

Consider an insurer handling a fender-bender claim. Typically, a company will use AI to speed up the paperwork while keeping the same layers of review and approval in place. But the real opportunity lies in redesigning the process entirely—having AI assess the damage based on a customer’s photos, then approving the claim and triggering payment nearly instantly. That kind of reimagining is difficult, and threatens established hierarchies and routines.

Finally, it is important to remember that transformative technologies have always taken longer to bring about the kind of deep changes their champions promised. Electricity rewired civilization but took four decades to show up meaningfully in productivity data. The internet reshaped the foundations of business, work and global competition but needed 10 to 15 years to seep into the bones of the economy. The internet’s early years looked, from the inside, a lot like AI does now: spectacular promise, uneven results and an industry with every incentive to tell you the revolution was already here.

“It takes time on human scales to actually transform organizations and unlock big changes,” says James Landay, the co-director of Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, who has spent years watching businesses struggle to absorb new technology. “My sense is more like five to 10 years—not the next two or three.”

AI will almost certainly prove as consequential as the internet, and probably will take about as long to reshape the economy. The boosters are directionally right about where this is all heading. The skeptics are probably right about how long it will take. Holding both thoughts at once is the most useful thing any executive, investor or policymaker can do right now.

Former Chelsea FC owner invited to Kyiv last month in failed attempt to broker direct negotiations

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy invited former Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich to Kyiv last month in a failed attempt to convince Vladimir Putin to hold direct peace talks, according to four people familiar with the matter.

Zelenskyy asked Abramovich to pass on a message to the Russian president that he was prepared to meet for what would have been their first bilateral summit more than four years into Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the people said.

Ukraine wanted to demonstrate its seriousness about holding direct peace talks with Russia, even as the US, which has sought to broker a ceasefire, is distracted by the war in the Middle East, they added.

Kyiv hopes its success in halting Russia’s offensive, which has slowed to a crawl in recent months as its forces sustain enormous casualties, and inflicting damage through long-range air strikes deep behind enemy lines will increase the impetus for an immediate ceasefire.

But Putin remains confident that Russia’s superior resources will eventually wear down Ukraine’s resistance and has shown no interest in meeting with Zelenskyy.

The involvement of the sanctioned billionaire has not been previously reported.

Putin said on Friday that he met “one of the representatives of our business circles” and “this, shall we say, colleague” on May 21 after his trip to Kyiv, and told him he did not see any point in meeting Zelenskyy. “The only sense in it is for the Ukrainians to stop the advance of our armed forces,” Putin told an audience at Russia’s flagship economic conference in St Petersburg. The Russian president added that the businessman was not acting in an official capacity.

The Ukrainian president’s office declined to comment.

The Kremlin and a spokesperson for Abramovich did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Abramovich has helped to mediate talks between Russia and Ukraine since the early weeks of the war in 2022.

The oligarch was involved in brokering a round of negotiations in Istanbul in March of that year, though the efforts soon collapsed after Ukraine learned of alleged war crimes by Russia’s occupying forces. Abramovich also helped to secure a deal to ensure exports of Ukraine’s grain through the Black Sea later that year.

Though Abramovich’s role has become less prominent since Russia began negotiating directly with the US last year, he remains involved in prisoner exchanges and other bilateral talks with Ukraine, including on aspects of a stalled US-led peace plan, according to people close to him.

“He is needed because he is the only Russian they will tolerate. He gets along with everyone,” one of the people said.

Zelenskyy has continued to push for a summit with Putin even as US efforts to secure a peace deal have stalled. “I don’t think anything substantial will happen until the end of summer,” said a person close to Zelenskyy, adding that Washington was focused on Iran and Moscow had yet to realise it would not be able to capture the remainder of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region this summer.

The Ukrainian leader, according to Abramovich, “thinks he can solve everything through the magic of his personal charisma at a leadership meeting”, another person close to the oligarch said.

Abramovich refers to Zelenskyy’s push as “the captain’s competition”, a feature from KVN, the comedy show that featured the Ukrainian president before he entered politics. “This is not something Putin goes for at all. And it doesn’t really work on Trump either. But Zelenskyy is totally fixated on it,” the person added.

Two senior Ukrainian officials described the message that Zelenskyy sent via Abramovich as similar to the open letter addressed to Putin that he published on his presidential website on Thursday, which provoked an angry response from Moscow. One of the officials said the tone of the message had been less antagonistic than that of the public note.

In the letter, Zelenskyy offered a ceasefire and to hold direct, one-on-one peace talks while taunting Putin over his battlefield setbacks and Ukraine’s long-range drone strikes on St Petersburg during his annual economic conference in his native city. The Ukrainian leader also mentioned Russia’s reliance on North Korea and its growing dependence on China to sustain the war.

“You will not have enough money or political capital to keep buying the loyalty of Russians the way you have for the past 26 years,” Zelenskyy told Putin in the letter.

But Putin said on Friday that the letter was “somewhat rude” and written “to create a condition under which it is actually impossible to hold any in-person meetings at all”.

Putin also said a Ukrainian drone strike on a teacher-training college in the Russian-held town of Starobilsk, which killed 21 people, a day after the meeting with Abramovich showed that Zelenskyy was not serious about seeking peace.

EU countries are discussing the appointment of an envoy who could hold talks with Putin on the continent’s behalf. But Putin has repeatedly floated the candidacy of former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, whose closeness to Moscow makes him a non-starter for the bloc, and dismissed most other potential candidates out of hand.

“I honestly just don’t see or understand how Russia could trust people who have been talking about the need to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia for years?” Putin said on Thursday. He said Russia remained open to potential talks and said they could be discussed “at the level of foreign ministries or secret services”, appearing to rule out his own involvement.

Industry body warns that profits will be halved by surging energy costs

Airlines face an extra $100bn in jet fuel costs this year after the Iran war sent prices spiralling higher, a global industry group has warned. 

As a result the industry’s combined net profits are expected to halve from $43bn in 2025 to $23bn this year, with the average margin dropping from 4.2 per cent to 2 per cent, according to the International Air Transport Association. 

“There are clearly wafer-thin margins,” said Willie Walsh, the former British Airways boss who is now director-general of Iata, at its annual meeting in Rio de Janeiro. 

The industry has already seen one major bankruptcy in 2026 — Spirit Airlines in the US — and is braced for further collapses in the coming months. Walsh said times were difficult “especially for those whose balance sheets had not yet recovered from Covid”. 

Jet fuel prices doubled after the Iran war that started in February led to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, gumming up a vital waterway for the global oil sector. But even though prices are expected to ease later in the year, Iata forecasts that the industry would still face an average increase of 70 per cent this year. 

The sector’s fuel bill was being further driven up by less efficient, ageing planes because of “failures” by aircraft and engine-makers to deliver enough models to the carriers, Walsh said. 

The average age of aircraft is now above 15 years, a record high, with the industry facing a backlog of 18,000 planes.

“Airlines face higher fuel costs with fleets that are less efficient,” said Walsh, adding this led to “missed efficiency gains, increased maintenance and higher lease rates”.

Iata calculated that flying older planes had cost airlines some $11bn in higher fuel bills during 2025. “Higher fuel prices only make that worse,” Walsh added. 

He told engine groups to “get back to making great engines that work and that last,” to applause from the airline chief executives gathered at the Iata meeting. “Allowing these failures to extend into next decade is totally unacceptable,” he added. 

Echoing comments from airline executives that demand was still strong, Walsh said that demand was “holding up” despite many carriers increasing ticket prices to offset higher costs. 

Iata found that 86 per cent of travellers “expect fares to track the oil price”, while some 49 per cent “expect to spend more on travel” this year.

Brent crude prices have jumped as high as $120 a barrel during the conflict, from just above $70 a barrel when it kicked off, but have since come back to $93 a barrel.

Board of Italy’s largest bank meets hours after rival proposed potential tie-up with MPS

Intesa Sanpaolo is preparing a joint bid with BPER for Monte dei Paschi di Siena, just hours after rival Banco BPM wrote to MPS’s board to propose a €50bn tie-up to create a new “national champion” in Italian banking.

Under the proposal, BPER, Italy’s fifth-largest lender, would take MPS’s banking activities, while Intesa, the country’s largest bank, would take its recently acquired Mediobanca unit and, consequently, its 13 per cent stake in insurer Generali, according to five people with knowledge of the deliberations.

Intesa is at present holding a board meeting to agree the details of its joint bid with BPER, which may be formalised as early as Sunday night, according to three of the people.

Intesa and BPER did not respond to multiple comment requests. MPS said it was unaware of any putative bid from Intesa and BPER.

The three people familiar with the matter said that while the outcome of Sunday’s board meeting was uncertain, both Intesa and BPER had been running a rule over MPS in recent weeks.

An offer from Intesa and BPER would set up a direct contest with Banco BPM, which earlier on Sunday told MPS it was interested in exploring a combination.

Milan-based BPM said that its board had “unanimously approved” approaching MPS to express interest in “initiating discussions aimed at exploring and agreeing on a potential negotiated merger between the two institutions”.

BPM said that a merger with MPS, the world’s oldest bank, would “create a new national champion”.

Its planned tie-up would create a combined group with a stock market capitalisation of more than €50bn, BPM said, and could give the bank more strategic options, including over MPS’s potential sale of its stake in Generali.

BPM did not disclose the financial terms of its proposal. MPS said the bank had received BPM’s proposal and would evaluate it.

BPM had a market capitalisation of €20.3bn at Friday’s close in Milan, while MPS was valued at €27.3bn.

Italian officials told the FT the BPM bid was opposed by some quarters of the country’s establishment, and that the Italian government was likely to have some reservations because BPM’s single largest shareholder is France’s Crédit Agricole.

The French group would end up with indirect control over 13 per cent of Generali, a large investor in Italian bonds, the officials said; a position that Giorgia Meloni’s government does not view favourably.

Rome has previously voiced its opposition to a tie-up between the asset management arms of Generali and French group Natixis.

BPM’s proposal and Intesa’s rival plans are the latest efforts to consolidate Italy’s fragmented banks and come after MPS last year acquired Milan-based Mediobanca in a €17bn deal that sent shockwaves through the sector.

At the same time, the Italian government is pursuing its ambitions to help create a “third pillar” in the industry to challenge UniCredit and Intesa, the sector’s two heavyweights.

UniCredit, led by veteran dealmaker Andrea Orcel, last year abandoned a takeover bid for BPM following government opposition.

Other Italian lenders may also be interested in acquiring MPS, Italian media have recently reported.

Bankers in Milan said that MPS was clearly a target for rivals. Its business, including ownership of Mediobanca and its stake in Generali, makes it an attractive asset.

MPS’s swoop on Mediobanca, which was finalised last September, stunned the country’s banking establishment.

Mediobanca was long regarded as a symbol of northern Italian corporate influence and a national power broker, while the smaller Tuscan commercial lender had for decades been considered the problem child of Italian banking.

MPS was hit by a bitter boardroom feud in March after chief executive Luigi Lovaglio was ousted following disagreements with board members and Francesco Gaetano Caltagirone, a billionaire industrialist and large shareholder.

Shortly before his ousting, Lovaglio had secured unanimous board backing for his three-year business plan, including the merger and delisting of Milan-based Mediobanca. MPS shareholders voted in April to reinstate Lovaglio as chief executive.