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Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

#101

Post by AJRF »

tetha wrote: post #77
chenxi9649 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea that's a good point. Now I am curious, what are some tasks that can accept a model that is at 80% as good as a human, but is 100x cheaper?(or, 100x faster?)

Similar to the sibling comment, helpdesk ticket routing. The volume of helpdesk tickets large enterprises deal with is very easily and vastly underestimated. If you can even route 30% away from the central triage with 90+% accuracy and drop everything else back to the central triage... you suddenly safe 2 FTEs in that spot in some places. And increase customer satisfaction for most of those tickets because they get r…

Hard agree - i've heard frankly staggering "per support ticket" costs from every company i've worked for, or has publicly talked about customer support costs. Think $3-6 dollar per customer support ticket.

A UK company, Octopus has been doing some interesting work on GenAI customer support, which is helped by their "Energy provider in a box" software called Kraken (https://octopusenergy.group/kraken-technologies), which gives a single unified view over their operations.

They even have support agent level of personalisation - i.e; the agent will talk in the tone of voice of a given agent via fine-tuning of their chat history.

Re: Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

#102

Post by allanwind »

mFixman wrote: post #40
PheonixPharts wrote: post #37

> I'd love to know what are some of the hidden challenges to making a useful product with agents? One thing that is still confusing to me, is that we've been building products with machine learning pretty heavily for a decade now and somehow abandoned all that we have learned about the process now that we're building "AI". The biggest thing any ML practitioner realizes when they step out of a research setting is that…

> You can do handwritten digit recognition with 90% accuracy? Sounds pretty good, but if you need to turn that into recognizing a 12 digit account number you now have a 70% chance of getting at least one digit incorrect. You are assuming that the probability of failure is independent, which couldn't be further from the truth. If a digit recogniser can recognise one of your "hard" handwritten digits, such as a 4 or a…

The "food" typo is just too good to ignore in this context.

Re: Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

#103

Post by allanwind »

tetha wrote: post #77
chenxi9649 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea that's a good point. Now I am curious, what are some tasks that can accept a model that is at 80% as good as a human, but is 100x cheaper?(or, 100x faster?)

Similar to the sibling comment, helpdesk ticket routing. The volume of helpdesk tickets large enterprises deal with is very easily and vastly underestimated. If you can even route 30% away from the central triage with 90+% accuracy and drop everything else back to the central triage... you suddenly safe 2 FTEs in that spot in some places. And increase customer satisfaction for most of those tickets because they get r…

I taught customer service / software engineers to process tickets from the singular queue and eliminated routing. Worked surprisingly well.

I have yet to see a chatbot in a customer service function that isn't strictly worse than a button. Usually, the button is "request refund / return" for whatever reason. It's like captcha stuff, web site owner is too dumb (no offense) to figure out how to handle spam so they offload that task onto the customer.

Re: Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

#104

Post by allanwind »

AJRF wrote: post #101
tetha wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to the sibling comment, helpdesk ticket routing. The volume of helpdesk tickets large enterprises deal with is very easily and vastly underestimated. If you can even route 30% away from the central triage with 90+% accuracy and drop everything else back to the central triage... you suddenly safe 2 FTEs in that spot in some places. And increase customer satisfaction for most of those tickets because they get r…

Hard agree - i've heard frankly staggering "per support ticket" costs from every company i've worked for, or has publicly talked about customer support costs. Think $3-6 dollar per customer support ticket. A UK company, Octopus has been doing some interesting work on GenAI customer support, which is helped by their "Energy provider in a box" software called Kraken ( https://octopusenergy.group/kraken-technologies ),…

You group tickets into root cause and the future projected cost will now fully fund fixing the issue. Most companies, however, look at customer support a cost center instead of valuable insight it is.

Re: Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

#105

Post by allanwind »

chenxi9649 wrote: post #66
Aerbil313 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A ton of tasks. Call centers to start with (they already do[1]), with human fallback. 1: In my country, after ChatGPT launched last year, when you call customer support you are now prompted to “just say in a few words” what you want instead of going through tap-this-number menus (they exist as a fallback) and I believe the backend is an LLM. The user flow and voice recordings are still programmatically determined tho…

Yea that's pretty cool too, I heard some restaurants are also doing a 100% voice LLM to take orders. Transcription, specifically Whisper, is one of those ML models where the accuracy is basically on-par with humans. So, I really expect a lot more to come out of real time voice/LLM integrations.(the ChatGPT voice thing is a good glimpse, but very janky)

"A firm providing AI drive-thru tech to fast food chains actually relies on human workers to take orders 70% of the time": https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-drive-thru-tech-relies-on...

Re: Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

#106

Post by Art9681 »

It's a search engine in a box, a snapshot of a corner of the internet, or some archive, or information generated via other automated processes, compressed via clever algorithms. It is a highly useful tool the gets more useful the more you use it. A good LLM+Retrieval can save a lot of time. It's a tool that brings information to you. A single pane of very fragile glass today.

I can honestly say that my use of search engines has decreased drastically and replaced with SOTA LLMs + Web retrieval.

Re: Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

#107

Post by jptoor »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #37

> I'd love to know what are some of the hidden challenges to making a useful product with agents? One thing that is still confusing to me, is that we've been building products with machine learning pretty heavily for a decade now and somehow abandoned all that we have learned about the process now that we're building "AI". The biggest thing any ML practitioner realizes when they step out of a research setting is that…

You're 100% right - but I do think there are more lower accuracy cases than I initially expected, *especially* if you assume a human-in-the-loop. Still 10x better than status quo.

Ex. Content generation + zero-shot classification/mapping are powerful, and with a human in the loop (somewhat) responsible for accuracy, they can move much faster.

Re: Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

#108

Post by [deleted] »

chenxi9649 wrote: post #43
PheonixPharts wrote: post #37

> I'd love to know what are some of the hidden challenges to making a useful product with agents? One thing that is still confusing to me, is that we've been building products with machine learning pretty heavily for a decade now and somehow abandoned all that we have learned about the process now that we're building "AI". The biggest thing any ML practitioner realizes when they step out of a research setting is that…

Yea that's a good point. Now I am curious, what are some tasks that can accept a model that is at 80% as good as a human, but is 100x cheaper?(or, 100x faster?)

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

#109

Post by TheLegace »

dongecko wrote: post #74
CharlieDigital wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can also build a network of agents My experience has been that they are far too unpredictable to be of use. In my testing with agent networks, it was a challenge to force it to provide a response, even if it was imperfect. So if there's a "reviewer" in the pool, it seemed to cause the cycle to keep going with no clear way of forcing it to break out. 3.5 actually worked better than 4 because it ran out of contex…

That is an interesting observation. I have not gotten to the point of too long cycles and I can think of two reasons for that. Maybe my use case is narrow enough, so that in combination with a rather constraining and strict system message an answer is easy to find. Second, I have lately played a lot with locally running LLMs. Their answers often break the formatting required for the agent to automatically proceed. So…

How do you get the output to be formatted correctly or without any branches.

Say for example I want a step-by-step instruction for an action.

But the response will have 1. 2. 3. and sometimes if there are multiple pathways there will long answer with 2.a,b,c,d. This is not ideal I would rather have the most simple case(2.a.) and a short summary for other options. I have described it in the prompt but still cannot get nice clean response without to many variations of the same step.

Re: Ask HN: What are some actual use cases of AI Agents right now?

#110

Post by Kerbonut »

alexawarrior3 wrote: post #2

None of these I've seen actually works in practice. Having used LLMs for software development the past year or so, even the latest GPT-4/Gemini doesn't produce anything I can drop in and have it work. I've got to go back and forth with the LLM to get anything useful and even then have to substantially modify it. I really hope there are some big advancements soon and this doesn't just collapse into another AI winter,…

> 1. An agent to automate generating web pages from design images - Given an image, produce the HTML and CSS. LLMs couldn't do this for my simple page from a web designer. Not even close, even mixing up vertical/horizontal flex arrangement. When I cropped the image to just a small section, it still couldn't do it. Tried a couple LLMs, none even came close. And these are pretty simple basic designs! I had to do it all manually.

That’s because none of the models have been trained on this. Create a dataset for this and train a model to do it and it will be able to do it.

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