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95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

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Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#101

Post by roflc0ptic »

mbStavola wrote: post #90
vasco wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the human agents agree the AI summaries are better than their summaries. I was nodding as I read and then told myself "yeah but it wouldn't be able to summarize the meetings I have", so I wonder if this only works in 3rd person.

Part of me also wonders if people may agree that its better simply because they don't actually have to do the summarization anymore. Even if it is worse by some %, that is an annoying task you are no longer responsible for; if anything goes wrong down the line, "ah the AI must've screwed up" is your way out.

I’m inclined to believe that call center employees don’t have a lot of incentive to do a good job/care, so a lossy AI could quite plausibly be higher quality than a human

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#102

Post by cube00 »

doubled112 wrote: post #74
jawns wrote: post #56

Full disclosure: I'm currently in a leadership role on an AI engineering team, so it's in my best interest for AI to be perceived as driving value. Here's a relatively straightforward application of AI that is set to save my company millions of dollars annually. We operate large call centers, and agents were previously spending 3-5 minutes after each call writing manual summaries of the calls. We recently switched to…

At work we've tried AI summaries for meetings, but we spent so much time fixing those summaries that we started writing our own again. Is there some training you applied or something specific to your use case that makes it work for you?

Unless a case goes down the legal road, nobody is ever bothering to read old call summaries in a giant call center.

When was the last time you called a large company and the person answering was already across all the past history without you giving them a case number first?

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#103

Post by loloquwowndueo »

pluc wrote: post #79
jawns wrote: post #56

Full disclosure: I'm currently in a leadership role on an AI engineering team, so it's in my best interest for AI to be perceived as driving value. Here's a relatively straightforward application of AI that is set to save my company millions of dollars annually. We operate large call centers, and agents were previously spending 3-5 minutes after each call writing manual summaries of the calls. We recently switched to…

You could do that offline 20 years ago with Dragon Naturally Speaking and a one-time licence.

Only if your audio was crystal clear, you spoke like a robot very slowly, and each customer has to do a 30-minute “please read this text slowly to train the speech recognition software” preamble before talking to the actual human.

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#104

Post by dingnuts »

lenerdenator wrote: post #55
highwaylights wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn’t be surprised if 95% of companies knew this was a money pit but felt obligated to burn a pile of money on it so as not to hurt the stock price.

I also wouldn't be surprised if bean counters were expecting a return in an unreasonable amount of time. "Hey, guys, listen, I know that this just completely torched decades of best practices in your field, but if you can't show me progress in a fiscal year, I have to turn it down." - some MBA somewhere, probably, trying and failing yet again to rub his two brain cells together for the first time since high school. J…

Sam Altman and company have been promising full on AGI. THAT'S the price shock.

Agents may be good (I haven't seen it yet, maybe it's a skill issue but I'm not spending hundreds of dollars to find out and my company seems reluctant to spend thousands to find out) but they are definitely, definitely not general superintelligence like SamA has been promising

at all

really is sinking in

these might be useful tools, yes, but the market was sold science fiction. We have a useful supercharged autocomplete sold as goddamn positronic brains. The commentariat here perhaps understood that (definitely not everyone) but it's no surprise that there's a correction now that GPT-5 isn't literally smarter than 95% of the population when that's how it was being marketed

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#105

Post by kingkawn »

IgorPartola wrote: post #34

What are the actual use cases that can generate revenue or at least save costs today? I can think of: 1. Generate content to create online influence. This is at this point probably way oversaturated and I think more sophisticated models will not make it better. 2. Replace junior developers with Claude Code or similar. Only sort of works. After all, you can only babysit one of these at a time no matter how senior you…

#5 is an enormous use case that when well implemented will permanently replace prescribed character arcs

It is uniquely susceptible because the gaming market is well acclimated to mediocre writing and one dimensional character development that’s tacked on to a software product, so the improvements of making “thinking” improvisational characters can be immense.

Another revenue potential you’ve missed is visual effects, where AI tools allow what were previously labor intensive and expensive projects to be completed in much less time and with less, but not no, human input per frame

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#106

Post by mannyv »

My daughter, as an intern, created a whole set of prompts for a metal fab that extracted all the metal parts out of a CAD file (or PDF) and dimensions so it's easier for them to bid.

Saved them hours of work.

Of course, they didn't spend on "AI" per se.

Most people don't know how to meta their job functions, so AI won't really be worth it. And the productivity gains may not be measurable ie: "I did this in 5 minutes instead of 500, so I was able to goof off more."

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#107

Post by lotsofpulp »

dsr_ wrote: post #86
jawns wrote: post #56

Full disclosure: I'm currently in a leadership role on an AI engineering team, so it's in my best interest for AI to be perceived as driving value. Here's a relatively straightforward application of AI that is set to save my company millions of dollars annually. We operate large call centers, and agents were previously spending 3-5 minutes after each call writing manual summaries of the calls. We recently switched to…

Pro-tip: don't write the summary at all until you need it for evidence. Store the call audio at 24Kb/s Opus - that's 180KB per minute. After a year or whatever, delete the oldest audio. There, I've saved you more millions.

The summaries can help automate performance evaluation. If the employee disputes it, I imagine they pull up the audio to confirm.

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#108

Post by recallingmemory »

jawns wrote: post #56

Full disclosure: I'm currently in a leadership role on an AI engineering team, so it's in my best interest for AI to be perceived as driving value. Here's a relatively straightforward application of AI that is set to save my company millions of dollars annually. We operate large call centers, and agents were previously spending 3-5 minutes after each call writing manual summaries of the calls. We recently switched to…

So long as precision isn't important, I suppose. Hallucination within summaries is the issue I keep running into which prevents me from incorporating it into any of our systems.

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#109

Post by doubled112 »

cube00 wrote: post #102
doubled112 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At work we've tried AI summaries for meetings, but we spent so much time fixing those summaries that we started writing our own again. Is there some training you applied or something specific to your use case that makes it work for you?

Unless a case goes down the legal road, nobody is ever bothering to read old call summaries in a giant call center. When was the last time you called a large company and the person answering was already across all the past history without you giving them a case number first?

Does an AI summary hold up in court? Or would you still need to review a transcript or recording anyway?

Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend

#110

Post by trevor-e »

jawns wrote: post #56

Full disclosure: I'm currently in a leadership role on an AI engineering team, so it's in my best interest for AI to be perceived as driving value. Here's a relatively straightforward application of AI that is set to save my company millions of dollars annually. We operate large call centers, and agents were previously spending 3-5 minutes after each call writing manual summaries of the calls. We recently switched to…

This is a great use-case of AI.

However I strongly doubt your point about "It's not going to replace anyone's job" and that "they also free up the human agents to do higher-value work". The reality in most places is that fewer agents are now needed to do the same work as before, so some downsizing will likely occur. Even if they are able to switch to higher-value work, some amount of work is being displaced somewhere in the chain.

And to be clear I'm not saying this is bad at all, I'm just surprised to see so many deluded by the "it won't replace jobs" take.

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