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There have been a lot of AI-related headlines lately. In this post, I’m questioning whether the investment in Artificial Intelligence will be worthwhile.

The Purpose Of Opinion Posts

Have you ever flicked through the news (or read a newspaper, heaven forbid!) and saw some outrageous headline followed by a very opinionated article? That “opinion editorial” (OpEd) was deliberately written to make you think, read more, and maybe even as clickbait. I used to be paid to write tech articles for Petri.com. Every now and then, I was asked to write an OpEd, something opinionated, that would make people read.

Why I’m Writing This Post

I have seen many news articles about AI lately. Then I saw a tweet by Brad Sams (previously the chief editor at Petri.com) where he wonders what the future of Windows Recall is. That triggered me after reading the news this morning.

The Promise of AI

Where I grew up, AI meant something very different that involved a vet, a long glove, a prime specimen bull, a syringe, and a herd of cattle. But then I went to college and sat through some awful classes on Prolog; I learned about the concept of artificial intelligence back in the mid-1990s. It was just a thing I associated with Hollywood movies until ChatGPT started to run wild a few years ago.

AI is meant to change everything. Huge amounts of data can be analysed in ways that humans cannot accomplish. Insights should be found. Decisions can be made or recommended. The mundane should be automated, freeing up humans to do more responsible tasks or tasks more suited to humans. The world should be better, thanks to AI.

The Realities of AI

I use a combination of generative AI tools for my job:

• It’s mostly replaced Google as my primary search engine. Google is faster and more accurate, but the commercial ordering of content makes it increasly unproductive.
• I’ve used it a lot for IaC and scripting. Every one of them makes the same awful, repetitive mistakes, where I’ve ended up writing off half a day and doing it 100% by hand. It’s not all been bad, but it’s very limited.
• I’ve used it for research on new topics.
• As a self-employed consultant, I need a reviewer. Copilot has become my chief editor to give me an opinion on my work. Quite honestly, this has been super.
• I’ve started training an agent to “clone myself” in the way that I work with Azure. This is going slowly.

Copilot is great for explaining a complex JSON-formatted error. I’ve used that a lot to cut to the chase. Copilot sucks at troubleshooting. Everyone knows how much AI hallucinates. We’ve all seen the scenario where it creates a whole “existence” of something that doesn’t exist. I’ve been given PowerShell cmdlets with full syntax explanations – only to find that neither the cmdlet nor the documentation exists! I’ve had troubleshooting tips or root cause suggestions that are complete fabrications that do not fit the fully explained scenario.

I may not be working in Foundry, etc, but I am using the main tools that most are using – and some are paying for.

Which leads me to … return on investment (ROI). It is believed that just 3% of M365 subscribers are paying for Copilot. I suspect that a tiny percentage of those subscribers are paying anything more than the basic amount. I wonder how many, like me, are using free-only SKUs of ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, etc?

Meanwhile, each of the hyperscalers is crippled by capacity issues. In Azure, I cannot deploy services/resources across Availability Zones in the regions that my clients are using. Microsoft Ireland was telling Irish customers to use Sweden Central instead of North Europe (Dublin, Ireland). Now Swedish users are complaining about capacity issues – we’re all eyeing up Denmark East now

You can bet that the capacity issues are AI-related. The GPUs for AI consume:

• A lot of space for the rack units and their cooling systems
• A lot of water
• A lot of electricity

In Ireland, we have lots of water – please, take some – so that’s not a constraint on data centre expansion here. If you do a little research, you’ll find that Microsoft has ~11 data centres in Grangecastle, Dublin (search on Google Maps for Cuisine De France). Those data centres are nearly full, and the expensive land there is occupied. Microsoft planned a 180MW expansion for North Europe in Jigginstown, Kildare. But those plans have gone nowhere – the last update was in July 2024. Why?

• Ireland’s electrical transmission grid is full. We have barely tapped our natural generational capacity, but we cannot transmit the electricity. It is estimated that 33% of the grid will be consumed by data centres in 2026! Localised bans have been established for data centre connections to the grid.
• Data centre manufacturers are building their own carbon-based power stations to counter the grid connection bans. Locals have invested huge amounts in carbon reduction. Those locals are angry that their efforts are being countered by international companies that (a) hire very few locals after construction and (b) pay less than their fair share of local corporation taxes.

AI is filling data centres. And this means that customers who want to use Cloud Computing are not able to get into those data centres. Something has to give.

Redundancies

I did a LinkedIn learning course on generative AI a few years ago. One of the presenters was a woman from Spain who promised that generative AI would free me up from mundane tasks to spend more time being creative. What are we going to do – knit scarves for when we have no electricity to heat our homes?

Microsoft (and others) released free SKUs of their products to “help us” techies with our programming, scripting, and infrastructure-as-code projects. In reality, these products are learning how to code/script from us. Then they are being or will be promised as a way to replace us. The same applies to other generative tasks and skills.

We can see the evidence of this now:

Recent headlines included:

• IBM recently announced that a bot would replace hundreds (not the rumoured thousands) of HR staff.
• Oracle made it clear that this week’s layoffs are for AI reasons.

What exactly are those people to do? I know that there were tech skills shortages, but a sudden dump of experienced talent is not natural and will flood the market with more skills than job availability.

A Generation Of Lost Skills

I guess, like many of you, now and then, someone will ask me, “What should I do in college?” I advise them to find a career that involves a lot of human interaction that cannot be automated. For example, I expect that AI will replace most of us in IT infrastructure or software development roles. I read a story yesterday about how one of the redundant Microsoft software engineers took up a career of welding.

I treat Copilot as a junior intern. I will delegate selected small tasks to it, but I have to:

• Be very selective of the tasks, considering the limited capabilities of generative AI.
• Review the work to combat hallucinations.

I previously worked in a consulting team where our main way to increase headcount was to hire interns directly from college. We could teach them and give them tasks that increased in complexity and responsibility. Over time, those interns became juniors, and some progressed to seniors. We saw the intern as an investment in future capacity and billing potential. Some made it, some didn’t. But we repouped the investment with those who progressed and stayed. The company, therefore, had a sustainable supply of skills.

Let’s go back to those big tech companies that are replacing skills with generative AI. They probably are not recruiting interns – in fact, it is widely reported that internships are harder to get thanks to AI. Those firms have AI bots that will learn, but can never really be trusted. I have no evidence or insider knowledge, but I suspect that recent cloud outages were caused by AI failures. The experienced humans who supervise the bots will age or move on, but where are the developing interns to replace them? Will they be off somewhere being creative?

Is The Squeeze Worth The Juice?

Ask the stock market what it thinks.

• Microsoft is down 24-36% year-to-date
• A $200 billion spend shook the market, and there are near-term cash-burn concerns.
• Meta has CapEx rising to $115–135B in 2026, raising sustainability questions.
• IBM experienced a 6.5% stock drop in Feb 2026 amid a broader AI sentiment “reset” and enterprise spending slowdown.
• Oracle is down ~50% from 2025 highs.

The market’s overall sentiment is worried about massive cap-ex spend. There is, admittedly, long-term optimism. However, I’d question that if:

• Actual purchases of AI are tiny compared to the investment
• Capacity issues will force clients to non-hyperscaler platform systems, which will reduce any investment in hyperscaler AI.
• Software quality will drop, which will force SLA compensation and drive customers elsewhere – not great when large swathes of the market are already dumping American software.

Here’s my crystal ball projection (I have a high fail rate with this stuff!). I think that the market will force a reset. The low ROI on AI, combined with slowing cloud consumption (capacity issues), will cause massive reactions. Skills will plummet. Reduced software quality will cause issues. AI will make bigger mistakes that cost lives/money. CEOs will fall. It may take a decade to regain the lost skills. It may take longer to regain faith in the Cloud if the problem persists too long.

And on that cheery note, I’ll wrap this up!

The post AI – Is The Squeeze Worth The Juice? first appeared on Aidan Finn, IT Pro.