Marketers love AI, but the sector’s growing debt and shaky foundations, means they could be the first to suffer if the hype-driven boom turns into a bust.
“How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?”
— Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve Chair, December 5, 1996
When Greenspan asked that question, the iPhone didn’t exist, and “dot-com” was as overused as AI is today. Four years later, the exuberance gave way to a rational collapse. Today, the same question hangs over artificial intelligence — only this time, the stakes are bigger and the debt exposure is deeper.
For digital marketers, whose tools, strategies and even customer experiences increasingly depend on AI systems, the fallout from a potential correction would be more than financial — it could be operationally crippling.
According to JPMorgan Chase, $ 1.2 trillion of debt is now tied to AI-related companies, making it the largest single segment of the investment-grade market. Never before has so much corporate debt been tied to such a speculative story about future productivity gains.
That debt is also masking deeper economic problems. Harvard economist Jason Furman recently calculated that GDP growth outside of data centers was just 0.1% in the first half of 2025. Remove AI infrastructure, and the U.S. economy is barely treading water.
‘Everybody’s going to do super well’
And yet, here’s OpenAI CEO Sam Altman earlier this month:
“We are in a phase of the build-out where the entire industry’s got to come together and everybody’s going to do super well. You’ll see this on chips. You’ll see this on data centers. You’ll see this lower down the supply chain.”
“The entire industry’s got to come together and everybody’s going to do super well.” That sentence is gibberish. Only an AI hallucination could connect it to how business operates. It isn’t meant to make sense, though. It’s meant to boost morale and keep everyone on the same page. Unfortunately, the “You’ll see” in the following three sentences has a whiff of desperation about it. They’re like Wile E. Coyote realizing the edge of the cliff is far behind him and not realizing that was the only reason he could defy gravity.
There’s more than a little of Willy Loman in Altman. Loman is the central character in the play “Death of a Salesman,” Arthur Miller’s dissection of American optimism turned fatal. Charley, the pragmatic neighbor, sums up Willy Loman’s decline this way:
“He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that’s an earthquake.”
When does self-belief become delusion?
That quote came to mind when I read what Sam Altman wrote in a 2019 blog post:
“The most successful people I know believe in themselves almost to the point of delusion. Self-belief alone is not sufficient — you also have to be able to convince other people of what you believe.”
In the play, Charley also says of Loman, “The only thing you’ve got in this world is what you can sell.” Right now, Altman is selling optimism, but what happens when he runs out of it?
So far, the optimism has been quite contagious. Unfortunately, AI’s trillion-dollar market is sustained by a web of “circular” mega-deals, in which companies buy from one another to inflate demand and justify valuations. The result is a self-reinforcing loop of capital, contracts and confidence — an economy feeding on its own expectations. That is the same behavior that pumped up the dot-com bubble.
The circularity of the AI economy means that many tools are simply wrappers around the same handful of foundational models. This creates a brittle ecosystem with little redundancy or actual competition (the tech industry’s ability to ignore Chinese LLMs — which are less expensive and as good as everyone else’s — is awe-inspiring and an insult to capitalism).
Why marketers should be concerned
If access to those foundational systems becomes restricted — due to API pricing changes, legal challenges or platform instability — entire marketing operations could grind to a halt. The risk isn’t just financial; it’s strategic and systemic.
In addition to direct economic damage, marketers should also be concerned because a decline in the AI sector could expose profound structural weaknesses across the martech ecosystem. Much of it relies on AI-powered services — from predictive analytics and media targeting to content generation and customer personalization.
Suppose overleveraged vendors begin to consolidate or collapse? Then, marketers may be left with broken tech stacks, unsupported platforms or escalating costs for services that were artificially priced low during the boom.
Marketers already have too much on their plates to be planning for doomsday. But maybe you should ask ChatGPT to put something together, just to be on the safe side. Because when the money dries up, your campaigns, workflows, maybe even your entire operation, could go with it.
The post If the AI bubble bursts, marketing could take the first hit appeared first on MarTech.
About the author
Constantine von Hoffman is managing editor of MarTech. A veteran journalist, Con has covered business, finance, marketing and tech for CBSNews.com, Brandweek, CMO, and Inc. He has been city editor of the Boston Herald, news producer at NPR, and has written for Harvard Business Review, Boston Magazine, Sierra, and many other publications. He has also been a professional stand-up comedian, given talks at anime and gaming conventions on everything from My Neighbor Totoro to the history of dice and boardgames, and is author of the magical realist novel John Henry the Revelator. He lives in Boston with his wife, Jennifer, and either too many or too few dogs.
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