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Why is AI so useless for business?

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Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#81

Post by goalieca »

jerzyt wrote: post #22

A better question would be why AI works great for some business (e.g. Netflix, AirBnB, Uber, Waze, Amazon) yet fails miserably for other (JC Penney, Sears). In my view, the older companies are trying to strap on AI on top of a traditional dataset, which never collected any useful signals. The new companies designed their entire business concepts around data, and collected what's needed from the get-go. Sears may have…

> Amazon applies A/B testing all the time - would anyone at Sears even know what it is?

I wouldn't be so certain of others ignorance. Retail stores have long done studies and applied consultants to problems on layout, music, pricing, etc.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#82

Post by colinmorelli »

x3blah wrote: post #75
ethanbond wrote: post #18

I’ve been working in the “real world business processes that companies are trying to AI-ify” realm for quite a while now. Pharma, cyber security, oil and gas production, etc. This article doesn’t mention a really, really straightforward factor for why AI hasn’t invaded these domains despite billions of dollars being dumped into them. An automated process only has to be wrong once to compel human operators to double o…

Why dump billions of dollars then? Nowhere else to spend it? Effective marketing?[1] Is no one asking this question? "... and critically: there's no one to hold responsible for getting it wrong." Could this be part of "AI"'s appeal? A dream of absolving businesses and individuals from accountability.[2] 1. "What's more, artificial research teams lack an awareness of the specific business processes and tasks that coul…

> Why dump billions of dollars then? Nowhere else to spend it? Effective marketing? Is no one asking this question?

Because whoever does achieve the next unlock - should it happen - will receive an unimaginably large windfall. This is the classic intent of venture capital. In fact, I'd suggest that AI is actually one industry where VC is doing what it does best: taking extremely risky bets with a large potential upside.

> Could this be part of "AI"'s appeal? A dream of absolving businesses and individuals from accountability.

Presently, this seems to be one of its large detractors. If I have an employee do something stupid, I can say that an employee did something stupid. People might wonder why they were allowed to do that stupid thing, and what we're going to do to prevent it from happening again, but the explanation of the source is satisfactory. We're fallible, and we understand the fallibility of others (generally speaking).

AI is not that at all. If my automation does something stupid, I still have all the blame, and yet I have nowhere else to pass it off to. "We don't understand why our AI did this really stupid thing" is, frankly, not a satisfying response (nor should it be). Businesses employing AI certainly are not absolved of any form of accountability, and are arguably exposed to more of it (since they're not able to pass the blame on to another fallible human, and have to take direct accountability of a system they built but don't fully understand).

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#83

Post by jerzyt »

MattGaiser wrote: post #54
jerzyt wrote: post #22

A better question would be why AI works great for some business (e.g. Netflix, AirBnB, Uber, Waze, Amazon) yet fails miserably for other (JC Penney, Sears). In my view, the older companies are trying to strap on AI on top of a traditional dataset, which never collected any useful signals. The new companies designed their entire business concepts around data, and collected what's needed from the get-go. Sears may have…

AI works for online businesses where you have millions going to a single interface and thus any testing is on a random selection of the population. You couldn't do that as well with different stores simply because malls have different demographics (meaning any conclusions could be noise) and the costs of shuffling where things are located is high so you can't just test 50 different setups and see what works.

Sears has been around for about a 100 years, and they have invented the catalog sales model - they were the Amazon of that era. I don't blame them for not doing things like A/B testing a 100 years ago, but 10 or 20? They were asleep at the wheel. That's when Walmart took off like a space rocket. Essentially the same offering to the same demographic. Yet Sears collapsed.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#84

Post by mcherm »

partyboat1586 wrote: post #74
BlackFly wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If school grades are indicative, even a 90% accuracy is commendable for human driven tasks. The big difference is that when a human double checks their own work, they may not make the same mistake twice. Or even better, when a second person checks the work. Mistakes are tolerable, but you need to be able to recover from them somehow, and recovery from an AI mistake seems to be something that people like to pretend is…

Train two AIs and have them check each others work. This must have been done already? No?

Are you training the two AIs on the same data set? If so, won't they be likely to make the same sorts of errors rather than making different errors and thus providing an effective check on each other?

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#85

Post by erfgh »

Because AI is not really AI as was meant in the 60's. The capabilities of computers, algorithms and human researchers were vastly overestimated back then.

But nowadays we find that the AI buzzword sells really well so we decided to lower and lower the bar until almost any algorithm qualifies as AI (also, any machine qualifies as a robot).

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#86

Post by thrower123 »

Mostly because business isn't really that hard, and we're still struggling to even define the rules it operates by.

AI alqays looks cool, but isn't very useful in practice. The past ten years feels like everything is keynote-driven development; get something nifty looking that demos well and try to shoehorn it into a business case.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#88

Post by monkeydust »

ackbar03 wrote: post #48
tyingq wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RPA can be a dangerous band aid. It often uses screen scraping or similar brittle interfaces that are known to change. Or, it doesn't know about certain error conditions, etc. Also, if it's been running for months before it breaks, the humans that used to do the work are gone, or have forgotten how to do it.

I've always found rpa a very curious thing. In some corners you have people really hyping it and how much value it can bring and everything e.g ui path and other products. But I can never imagine it to be a very good solution, the thing must be extraordinarily fragile and rule based clicking automation is a real pain to put together.

Ditto always felt like 'poor mans automation' to me but in some fields for some tasks it seems to deliver rapid ROI which is what the C suite love.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#89

Post by rb808 »

Most AI guys I know are just interested in playing around in pilot projects and learning stuff while they train to get a job at Google. It'll only be a few years before managers figure out there will be very little delivered.

Re: Why is AI so useless for business?

#90

Post by toss1 »

sitkack wrote: post #64
tyingq wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RPA can be a dangerous band aid. It often uses screen scraping or similar brittle interfaces that are known to change. Or, it doesn't know about certain error conditions, etc. Also, if it's been running for months before it breaks, the humans that used to do the work are gone, or have forgotten how to do it.

The work an RPA does is obvious, you can watch what it does. Your first statement is a trusism, any solution can be a dangerous band aid, if applied incorrectly. RPAs solve real problems now , really the only correct measure. Of the RPAs I have raised, I always watched them work, they just prevent mistakes. I would suggest taking a screen recording and verbally annotating it for posterity. Furthermore, nothing says y…

Good advice - carefully observing the process, annotating successful (& failing) processes and installing post-hoc checks seem like sound practices. Do you have other such practices to recommend? Can you say anything about what your production and testing stack look like (esp the versions that work better)?
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