What if enterprises report almost no return on their AI spending?
Mass enterprise AI-ROI disappointment stalls inference demand and compresses software multiples, dragging Nvidia and the whole capex chain plus high-beta crypto. The textbook analogue is the Jul-2024 'where's the AI return' megacap selloff and DeepSeek Jan-2025. Forward angle: ROI is lumpy and back-loaded — a single weak quarter has historically been bought; the durable bear case needs two consecutive prints of stalling token consumption.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 6–18 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Enterprises report negligible AI ROI en masse, stalling inference demand and compressing AI-software multiples. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — AI capex ▼ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.