Spending 93% on tech, 7% on people
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In boardrooms around the globe, a specific anxiety is taking hold. It isn’t just the fear of robots taking jobs; it is the paralyzing worry of “buyer’s remorse” in a market moving at breakneck speed. According to Bill Briggs, Deloitte’s chief technology officer, as we move from AI experimentation to impact/value at scale, that fear is driving a lopsided investment strategy where companies are pouring 93% of their AI budget into technology and only 7% into the people expected to use it.
Briggs highlighted this “93-7” split as something that really surprised him—and a critical error. Organizations are obsessing over the “ingredients”—the models, chips, and software—while ignoring the “recipe,” which includes the culture, workflow, and training required to make the technology work. Briggs compared this tech-heavy approach to “trying to get paella” but ending up with “just cilantro.”
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Zuckerberg was the only tech CEO to have said outloud (paraphrased) "if we throw some much money at the hardware, maybe we should also throw a lot of money to get the best people to match" as he built Meta's "Superintelligence" team. The other tech CEOs may compete with Meta for people but no one has said similar thing out loud.
