Nathaniel Whittemore

Apparently this was not a sophisticated hack, but engineers at Instagram going overboard to use AI for everything and having no incentives for stuff like security.

You get what you incentivize.

A warning for any company wanting to copy Meta.

Added Jeffrey Emanuel, If Meta can't manage agents in an acceptable way in their own infrastructure, how could they possibly expect anyone else to want to use any of their stuff?

Next up, we have the latest story in our summer slowdown series.

Management consulting firm Bain & Company has warned that a lack of AI ROI should be making executives nervous.

That's their framing, by the way.

In a new survey of large companies conducted in April, Bain found that cost savings from AI automation are falling short of projections.

Almost 40% of companies reported that measured AI cost savings were below 10%, despite targeting between 11% and 20%.

The survey found a big disconnect between the use cases management were targeting and the realities on the ground.

And one of the interesting wrinkles Bain found is that 44% of companies were cash-flowing the next leg of AI investment on the basis of assumed cost savings, meaning that if those cost savings weren't materializing, that was going to create problems downstream.

They wrote, "...self-funding the next wave from past returns sounds like discipline."

In reality, it's a circular bet with a structural leak.

Now, some of the big issues that Bain found in terms of what was going wrong for AI deployments included 41% of companies saying that there were issues around data access or data integration, with more than 25% of respondents also flagging concerns including compliance issues, competing business priorities, and skills gaps.

Meanwhile, over at Walmart, the company is limiting their employees' use of AI tools after surging demand.

In the latest story showing the shift to the token shortage era, excess demand from employees has caused Walmart to end their unlimited token policy for their core agentic tool called CodePuppy.

CodePuppy is a co-work style agent useful for tasks beyond coding, including preparing presentations and working with spreadsheets.

Workers now have a token budget, although sources didn't indicate what the new token limit is.

Now, a Walmart spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company still wants its employees to use AI, but is now providing additional training to help people be more efficient in the way they use AI.

But expect to see a lot more of this end of unlimited token policy as agent exile use cases come online.