McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits
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Re: McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits
#2Maybe they could send them to Harvard Business School?
Re: McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits
#3That is good news for once. If McKinsey is on the case, "AI" will soon fail (after McKinsey has raked in consultancy fees).
Re: McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits
#4> while quoting an HR executive at a Fortune 100 company griping: "All of these copilots are supposed to make work more efficient with fewer people, but my business leaders are also saying they can't reduce head count yet."
I'm surprised McKinsey convinced someone to say the quiet part out loud
Re: McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits
#5> Software vendors keen to monetize AI should tread cautiously, since they risk inflating costs for their customers without delivering any promised benefits such as reducing employee head count.
That's easy. Reduce the headcount first, and then let the remaining team of poor and desperate, I mean, elite engineers and support teams AI for /s.
When will boards replace executive leadership with AI? If Return to Office taught us anything, it was that we already need a couple, and the rest of them copy and paste. Well, AI can do that! Also /s, but maybe just 50%.
Re: McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits
#6> while quoting an HR executive at a Fortune 100 company griping: "All of these copilots are supposed to make work more efficient with fewer people, but my business leaders are also saying they can't reduce head count yet." I'm surprised McKinsey convinced someone to say the quiet part out loud
Also strange that this executive is worried about how the business continues to function after the people are gone. That's not the McKinsey Way!
Re: McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits
#7What most companies and CEOs fail to grasp is that with all the talk of headcount cuts from AI customers are expecting that AI will LOWER pricing and costs, not raise it. Challenge is that the cost cutting story is mostly vaporware (as many other studies have shown) so CEOs are in a tough spot. They can’t both boast to shareholders at how much cost savings they got from rolling out AI and then charge customers more.
All this is pretty textbook setup for how this bubble finally implodes as companies fail to deliver on their AI investments and come under fire from shareholders for spending a ton with little return to show for it.
Re: McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits
#8Truth is out people. They are confessing it now.
Re: McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits
#9> while quoting an HR executive at a Fortune 100 company griping: "All of these copilots are supposed to make work more efficient with fewer people, but my business leaders are also saying they can't reduce head count yet." I'm surprised McKinsey convinced someone to say the quiet part out loud
I find it all quite strange:
- AI companies of course will try and sell you that you can reduce headcount with AI
- CEO's will parrot this talking point without ever talking a closer look.
- Everyone lower down on the org chart minus the engineers are wondering why the change hasn't started yet.
- Meanwhile engineers are ripping their hair out cause they know that AI in it's current state will likely not replace any workers.
Pretty soon we will have articles like "That time that CEO's thought that AI could replace workers".
Re: McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits
#10AI in its present form is probably the strangest and the most paradoxical tech ever invented.
These things are clearly useful once you know where they excel and where they will likely complicate things for you. And even then, there's a lot of trial and error involved and that's due to the non-deterministic nature of these systems.
On the one hand it's impressive that I can spawn a task in Claude's app "what are my options for a flight from X to Y [+ a bunch of additional requirements]" while doing groceries, then receive a pretty good answer.
Isn't it magic? (if you forget about the necessity of adding "keep it short" all the time). Pretty much a personal assistant without the ability of performing actions on my behalf, like booking tickets - a bit too early for that.
Then there's coding. My Copilot has helped me dive into a gigantic pre-existing project in an unfamiliar programming language pretty fast and yet I have to correct and babysit it all the time by intuition. Did it save me time? Probably, but I'm not 100% sure!
The paradoxicality is in that there's probably no going back from AI where it already kind of works for us individually or at org levels, but most of us don't seem to be fully satisfied with it.
The article here pretty much confirms the paradox of AI: yes, orgs implement it, can't go back from it and yet can't reduce the headcount either.
My prediction at the moment is that AI is indeed a bubble but we will probably go through a series of micro-bursts instead of one gigantic burst. AI is here to stay almost like a drug that we will be willing to pay for without seeing clear quantifiable benefits.