The PromptFluent State of AI Debt Report (2023-2026)
A comprehensive research briefing synthesizing findings from Asana, Stanford, BetterUp, S&P Global, Forrester, Deloitte, McKinsey, MIT Media Lab, and IBM on the financial and operational impact of unmanaged AI execution across the enterprise.
42%
of companies abandoned most AI initiatives in 2025
S&P Global, 2025
$9.3M
annual workslop cost per 10,000 employees
Stanford/BetterUp, 2025
$14,200
per employee per year in hallucination mitigation
Forrester, 2025
47%
of enterprise users made major decisions based on hallucinated content
Deloitte, 2025
15.4%
of AI-assisted work is 'workslop' requiring rework
Stanford Social Media Lab, 2025
Only 19%
of employees feel confident evaluating AI output quality
Asana, 2025
Global GenAI spending reached $644 billion in 2025, yet 95% of enterprise AI pilots failed to deliver measurable ROI. 79% of companies expect to incur AI debt. The gap between AI investment and AI outcomes is widening.
40% of workers receive AI-generated 'workslop' monthly. Each incident takes 1 hour 56 minutes to resolve at a cost of $186 per employee per month. For a 10,000-person organization, that is $9.3 million annually.
Global losses from AI hallucinations reached $67.4 billion in 2024. 47% of enterprise AI users made at least one major business decision based on hallucinated content. Each enterprise employee costs approximately $14,200 per year in hallucination mitigation.
75% of knowledge workers use AI tools not sanctioned by their organization. Only 32% of employees received any AI training. The result: unmanaged AI execution producing ungoverned outputs at scale.
Organizations lose 20-40% of IT budgets to technical debt maintenance. Ignoring tech debt reduces AI ROI by 18-29%. A $20B enterprise could incur $120M+ per year in hidden AI costs.
Only 21% of companies fundamentally redesigned workflows when deploying GenAI. The organizations in the 5% that achieve measurable P&L impact treat AI execution as infrastructure -- not an experiment.
15 research sources. Quantified costs. The complete picture of why AI is creating debt -- and what infrastructure can do about it.
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