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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

#131

Post by pgwhalen »

highwaylights wrote: post #28
JCM9 wrote: post #16

We are entering the “Trough of disillusionment.” These hype cycles are very predictable. GPT-5 being panned as a disappointment after endless hype may go down as GenAI’s “jump the shark” moment. It’s all fun and games until the bean counters start asking for evidence of return on investment. GenAI folks better buckle up. Bumps ahead. The smart folks are already quietly preparing for a shift to ride the next hype wave…

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.

It's hard to define what it means for a company to know something, but as a person inside a company spending on gen AI efforts, I'm pretty confident that we're not investing in it just to maintain an elevated valuation (we're a mature, privately owned company).

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

#132

Post by butlike »

PaulRobinson wrote: post #100
butlike wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you double-check the work? Also, what happens when the AI transcription is wrong in a way that would have terminated the employee. You can't fire a model. Finally, who cares about millions saved (while considering the above introduced risk), when trillions are on the line?

Having a human read a summary is way faster than getting them to write it. If they want to edit it, they can. AI today is terrible at replacing humans, but OK at enhancing them. Everyone who gets that is going to find gains - real gains, and fast - and everyone who doesn't, is going to end up spending a lot of money getting into an almost irreversible mistake.

"Reading a summary is faster, so enhancing humans with AI is going to receive boons or busts to the implementer."

Now, summary, or original? (Provided the summary is intentionally vague to a fault, for arguments sake on my end).

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

#133

Post by cube00 »

doubled112 wrote: post #109
cube00 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can store low quality audio cheaply on cold storage so I suspect that's the real legal record if it got that far.

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

#134

Post by thrown-0825 »

recallingmemory wrote: post #108
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.

I have seen ai summaries of calls get people into trouble because the ai hallucinated prices and features that didn't exist

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

#135

Post by vdupras »

onlypassingthru wrote: post #111
vdupras wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Wasn't half of Napoleon's army gone by the time he reached Moscow?[0] It's the sunk cost fallacy writ large with dead bodies, no? [0] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Napoleon-march-graphic-C...

Certainly, and they lost the other half on the way home. On the way to Moscow, there was still something to look forward to. In Moscow, with no supply, dying like flies, all they had to look forward to was a long march through the Almighty Intense Winter, during which they'd be dying like flies too.

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

#136

Post by beepbooptheory »

spogbiper wrote: post #76
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…

I am working on a project that uses LLM to pull certain pieces of information from semi-structured documents and then categorize/file them under the correct account. it's about 95% accurate and we haven't even begun to fine tune it. i expect it will require human in the loop checks for the foreseeable future, but even with a human approval of each item, its going to save the clerical staff hundreds of hours per year.…

How will you know in practice which 5% is wrong?

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

#137

Post by belter »

gmd63 wrote: post #91
belter wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US mix of government and enterprise. You want Capital you need to be MAGA "Donald Trump and Silicon Valley's Billionaire Elegy" - https://www.wired.com/story/donald-trump-and-silicon-valleys... "Secret White House spreadsheet ranks US companies based on loyalty to Trump" - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/08/15/secret-white...

Smartest people will be working against that. You're thinking of opportunistic people with myopia.

The law firms failed to do so.

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

#138

Post by lacy_tinpot »

taormina wrote: post #78
lacy_tinpot wrote: post #39

Why do people so desperately want to see AI fail?

Why do people so desperately want to see AI succeed? The financial investment explains it for some.

Why do want a technology that's able to automate human drudgery? Feels like an absurd question.

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

#139

Post by anoojb »

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.

Also entrenches plausible deniability and makes legal contests way more cumbersome for plantiffs to resolve.

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

#140

Post by jordanb »

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…

We use Google meet and it has Gemini transcriptions of our meetings.

They are hilariously inaccurate. They confuse who said what. They often invert the meaning "Joe said we should go with approach x" where Joe actually said we should not do X. It also lacks context causing it to "mishear" all of our internal jargon to "shit my iPhone said" levels.

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