Record profits, record AI spend, record layoffs — same companies, same year. Tap a tile for the receipts. The charts below are where the story stops adding up.
Read the Wire →Tech layoffs by month — May was the worst since Aug 2024. See the board →
“AI” went from footnote to headline — 7% of cuts in Jan, 40% by May. Why now? →
They’re spending ~45× the layoff savings on AI. So who are the cuts really for? Follow the money →
Fiction, for the record. Corporate AI Donkey Chase comedy is satire. All characters, companies, and scenarios are fictitious and do not represent — or claim to depict — any real company, any situation within a company, or any actual person. Episodes are creative compositions: themes stitched together from a range of material posted publicly across the internet, for entertainment purposes only.
Someone promised AI would transform everything by Q3. The transformation team assembled. The donkey had other plans.
The strategy evolved. The mandate strengthened. The donkey is still approximately 40 feet ahead.
The training was delivered, the certificates issued, the Confluence page published. Nobody changed anything.
The diagnosis is always change management. The prescription is another 90-minute facilitated workshop.
The AI was fine. It was the humans asking it to explain the org chart, predict Q4, and own the relationship.
Named, defined, brand-approved, and still chasing the same donkey it started with in January.
You get a license. You get a license. Nobody uses the license. The vendor calls it strong adoption metrics.
She flagged the integration risk on day one. It shipped anyway. It broke exactly where she said it would.
The PM owns the outcome, the timeline, the stakeholder map — and somehow none of the actual decisions.
He saw the demo. He loved the demo. The production environment remains, as always, a separate matter.
The architecture review board met. Concerns were logged. A reference design was produced. Nothing was built to spec.
They asked for order tracking. They received an AI-powered omnichannel engagement intelligence platform. Same price.
For the record: the AI did not promise 10x productivity. That was the vendor deck. Please stop blaming the model.
Corporate AI transformation is a performative loop. Leadership signals innovation. Operational reality doesn't change. Or gets worse.
The people building it know it's broken. Nobody says it out loud. Until now.
AI Donkey Chase is the brand that names the dysfunction, laughs at it honestly, then shows the people in the trenches what actually works — and who actually builds it.
If your roadmap is three slides and a prayer, you're already in the chase.
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