An AI adoption riddle

If AI's hype has been punctured, I couldn't find a company willing to talk about it. A few weeks ago, I set out on what I thought would be a straightforward reporting journey. After years of momentum for AI--even if you didn't think it would be good for the world, you probably thought it was powerful enough to take seriously--hype for the technology had been slightly punctured. First there was the underwhelming release of GPT-5 in August. Then a report released two weeks later found that 95% of generative AI pilots were failing, which caused a brief stock market panic. I wanted to know: Which companies are spooked enough to scale back their AI spending?