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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

#111

Post by rybosworld »

resolutefunctor wrote: post #80
rybosworld wrote: post #48

Looking at this from a software dev perspective: - The moment AI is actually good enough to replace us, it will also be incredibly easy to create new software/apps/whatever. There could/would be a billion solo dev SAAS companies eating the lunch of every traditional tech org. - People (Executives) seem to underestimate just how much of the work is iterating and refining a product over a long time. Getting an LLM good…

Your perspective on your last point is interesting. I actually feel the opposite, its become a motivator for me. I used to love coding, and did it a ton. Then it became less and less part of my job, and I started hating coding. It was so frustrating when I knew exactly what needed to be done in the code, but had to spend the time doing low value stuff like typing syntax, tracing through the code to find the right fil…

That's a fair point and I actually agree with you. A large part of writing code is doing something menial as you said.

I think both of the viewpoints are valid depending on where you're at in your career.

We can imagine a junior developer who isn't quite bored with those low-value tasks just yet.

As you grow more senior/experienced, the novel problems become harder to find - and those are the one's you want to work on. AI can certainly help you cut through the chaff so you have more time to focus on those.

But trends are trends and AI is increasingly getting better at solving the novel/interesting problems that I think you're referring to.

Everyone's different and I know there are folks who are excited to not have to write a single line of code. I'd wager that's not actually most engineers/developers though.

People still garden by hand because it's innately satisfying.

Re: McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits

#112

Post by dahcryn »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #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

both make a lot of sense, but the biggest mistake they make is to see people as capacity, or as a counter.

Each human can be a bit more productive, I fully believe 10-15% is possible with today's tools if we do it right. But each human has it unique set of experience and knowledge. If I do my job a bit faster, and you do your job a bit faster. But if we are a team of 10, and we do all our job 10% faster, doesn't mean you can let one of us go. It just means, we all do our job 10% faster, which we probably waste by drinking more coffee or taking longer lunch breaks

Re: McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits

#113

Post by josefritzishere »

btbuildem wrote: post #60

This is because they're trying to reduce the wrong headcount. The largest inefficiencies in corpo orgs lie in the ways they organize their knowledge and information stores, and in how they manage decision making. The rank and file generally have a really good grasp on their subset of the domain -- they have expertise and experience, as well as local context. Small teams, their managers -- those are the ones who actua…

Management will not volunteer to replace themselves. So that would mean that if that's all that Ai is trully good at... the product is unsalable.

Re: McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits

#114

Post by delusional »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #72
paulsutter wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, it’s much easier with a new organization. In my previous company, we would speculate about where to use AI and we were never sure. In the new company we use AI for everything and produce more with substantially fewer people

Does anyone want what you're producing though? I don't mean to be dismissive and crappy right out of the gate with that question, I'm merely drawing on my experience with AI and the broader trends I see emerging: AI is leveraged when you need knowledge products for the sake of having products, not when they're particularly for something. I've noticed a very strange phenomenon where middle managers will generate long,…

> Does anyone want what you're producing though?

He's either lying or hard-selling. The company in his profile "neofactory.ai" says they "will build our first production line in Dallas, TX in Q3." well, we just entered Q4, so not that. Despite that it has no mentions online and the website is just a "contact us" form.

Re: McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits

#115

Post by johndhi »

mojuba wrote: post #95
johndhi wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like one benefit of humans is you can find someone you can truly trust under almost all circumstances and delegate to them. With AI you have a thing you can't quite trust under any circumstance even if it's pretty good at everything.

A hammer doesn't always work as desired, it depends on your skills plus some random failures. When it works however, you can see the result and are satisfied with it - congratulations, you saved some time by not using a rock for the same task.

I can trust a hammer will be a hammer, though.

Re: McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits

#116

Post by dahcryn »

alberth wrote: post #45

McKinsey has pitched my company on projects where their compensation is entirely outcome-based — for example, if a project generates $20 million in incremental revenue, they would earn 10% of that amount. I have to admit, the results they demonstrated — which we validated using our own data — were impressive. The challenge, however, is that outcome-based contracts are hard for companies to manage, since they still ne…

that's usually in areas where they are very certain.

I'd be surprised if they'd do that for GenAI projects, maybe only for really good clients that pay them 50mln+ a year anyway

Re: McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits

#118

Post by apwell23 »

nostrademons wrote: post #83
btbuildem wrote: post #60

This is because they're trying to reduce the wrong headcount. The largest inefficiencies in corpo orgs lie in the ways they organize their knowledge and information stores, and in how they manage decision making. The rank and file generally have a really good grasp on their subset of the domain -- they have expertise and experience, as well as local context. Small teams, their managers -- those are the ones who actua…

I've wondered sometimes what the root of this dynamic is, and why corporations are as inefficient as they are. I've come to the conclusion that it's deliberate. When I look at top-level decision-makers at my Mag-7 employer, they are smart people. Many of them were go-getters in their earlier career, responsible for driving some very successful initiatives, and that's why they're at the top of the company. And they're…

> So CEOs of successful companies have a job to do, and that job is to ensure that nothing happens. But people's natural inclination is to do things, and if they aren't doing things inside your company they will probably be doing things outside your company that risk toppling it. So you put one section of the company to work digging holes, and put the other section to work filling them in, and now everybody is happy and productive and yet there's no net external change to your company's position.

i work at a large music streamer and this perfectly describes my workplace. when i was outside i never understood why that company needs thousands and thousands of ppl to run what looks like stagnant product that hasn't changed much in years.

Re: McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits

#119

Post by fluidcruft »

btbuildem wrote: post #60

This is because they're trying to reduce the wrong headcount. The largest inefficiencies in corpo orgs lie in the ways they organize their knowledge and information stores, and in how they manage decision making. The rank and file generally have a really good grasp on their subset of the domain -- they have expertise and experience, as well as local context. Small teams, their managers -- those are the ones who actua…

I think another barrier is that end users don't trust IT to not pull the rug out from under us. It's quite a bit of effort to learn and figure out workflows for actually getting work done and IT doesn't tend to give a shit about that. Particularly enterprise IT's attitude about trials can kiss my ass. Enterprise IT has their timeline, and I have my deadlines. I'll get to it when I have time.

But particularly we're always dealing with IT security "experts" running dumb checklists taking things away and breaking everything and never bothering figure out how we're supposed to use computers to actually get any work done ("hmmm. we didn't think about that... we'll get back to you" is a common response from these certified goons). Apparently the security gods have decided we can't have department file servers anymore because backups are too difficult to protect against ransomware or something so we're all distracted with that pronouncement from the mountain trying to figure out how to get anything done at the moment.

Re: McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits

#120

Post by Aperocky »

an0malous wrote: post #38
jmuguy wrote: post #14

I hadn't ever tried Notion before but I sort of vaguely understood it was a nice way to make some documentation and wiki type content. I had a need for something like a table that I could filter that I would normally just do in Google Sheets. So I go check out Notion and their entire site is focused on AI. Look at what this agent can do, or that. I signed up and the entire signup flow is also focused on AI. Finally I…

The startup I work at is doing the same strategy pivot, we’re integrating AI into every feature of the platform. Every textbox or input field has the option to generate the value from AI. Feature that no one used when it was a simple form with a button can now be done through our chatbot. We have two key product metrics for the entire company and one of them is how many AI tokens our users are generating.

AI tokens that you pay for?
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