There is a version of this conversation that happens at nearly every networking event, in nearly every industry, right now. Someone mentions what they are doing with AI, or what they heard a competitor is doing, and the room shifts slightly. People nod. Then, quietly, they wonder if they are falling behind.

That feeling has a name. FOMO, fear of missing out, has always been a feature of business life. But the current wave of AI FOMO has a specific texture. It is not quite fear of a competitor gaining a clear advantage. It is something more diffuse: a low-grade anxiety that the world is reorganising itself, and that standing still is the same as going backwards. It is the feeling of being in motion without knowing the direction.

A client I worked with recently, a twenty-person professional services firm, had signed up for four different AI tools in the space of eight months. Not because they had a specific problem to solve. Not because anyone on the team had asked for them. Because the partners kept reading about AI, kept hearing about it at conferences, and felt they had to do something.

When we sat down to review what was actually in use, the answer was almost nothing. Two of the tools had never been opened after the trial period. One was used occasionally by one person, for tasks she had stumbled onto by accident. The fourth had been cancelled the previous month after the invoice came up at a board meeting.

The partners were not embarrassed. They were relieved to be talking about it plainly. “We knew we weren’t really using any of it,” one of them said. “But we felt like we couldn’t not be trying.”

That last sentence is worth sitting with.

AI FOMO is not primarily about AI. It is about the gap between two speeds: the speed of the conversation, which is relentless and accelerating, and the speed of actual adoption, which requires process clarity, change management, and the unglamorous work of getting people to change how they do their jobs day to day.

The conversation moves faster than any organisation can absorb it. Every week brings a new tool, a new capability, a new case study of a business that has apparently transformed itself. The gap between what is being announced and what most businesses are actually doing keeps widening, even as real adoption slowly increases. That gap is where FOMO lives.

The other thing about FOMO is that it is directional without being specific. It tells you to move, but not where. And so businesses default to what feels like action: buying tools. Software subscriptions are visible. They appear on invoices. They can be shown to boards and partners as evidence of engagement. The harder work of understanding where a process is broken, mapping a workflow, deciding what problem is actually worth solving, is invisible. It produces no receipt.

This is not a criticism. It is a description of a rational response to an irrational information environment. When the volume of signal is very high and the signal-to-noise ratio is low, purchasing feels like progress because it is the most legible form of action available.

There is a social dimension too. AI has become, in a relatively short period, a marker of seriousness. To have done nothing is, in some circles, to look like you have not been paying attention. The subscription is partly a statement, to peers, to employees, to yourself, that you are engaged.

There is also a supply-side explanation. The tools are genuinely easier to try than they used to be. A free trial, a credit card, and twenty minutes gets you access to something that would have required a six-figure enterprise contract five years ago. The friction of starting has been engineered away. What remains is the harder question of what to do once you have started, and that question is largely unanswered by the vendors, because answering it requires understanding your specific business.

The result is a pattern that shows up repeatedly across different sectors and sizes of company: high trial rate, low embedding rate. Many businesses have tried something. Few have changed anything.

Part of this is about how AI is marketed. The dominant pitch for most tools is capability: look what it can do. The missing conversation is about context: what it needs from you to do it well. A language model can draft a client update, but only if someone has thought through what the update needs to say, who it is going to, and what outcome it is meant to achieve. The time saved on drafting is real, but it does not eliminate the thinking. It just moves it. Businesses that expect the tool to do the thinking tend to be disappointed. Businesses that have done the thinking before they reach for the tool tend to get something useful.

That gap between capability and context is where a lot of the disappointment lives. It is also where the FOMO loop feeds itself. If the tool did not deliver, perhaps the wrong tool was chosen. And so the search continues.

The feeling will not resolve itself by adding another subscription. The pace of the conversation is not slowing down. A business that has one working AI application, genuinely embedded, saving real time for real people, is in a better position than one with four tools and a vague sense of obligation. But the path to that position starts with a specific problem, not a signup form.

The FOMO is real. So is the cost of acting on it without a clear reason.