McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by caminante » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 3:34 PM UTC

flumpcakes wrote: post #130

caminante wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's upfront about a backloaded earnout? You model it as a fixed %, variable cost and run revenue sensitivities. It either meets your investment criteria or doesn't.

Perhaps their advice needs expenditure up front - for example if they suggested using blue photocopiers and you only have pink ones. You would have to spend the money on blue photocopiers before you see the return, and before they see their services fee paid?

Per the parent's update, they're overthinking things like how earnouts or how capital budgeting cycles work.

e.g., complaining about having to provision an FTE to manage the earnout doesn't make sense because that should be in the business plan considered for approval. You'd only approve if your NPV is positive, including the FTE overhead.

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

#162

Post by apwell23 » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 12:29 PM UTC

deaux wrote: post #52

itake wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incentive structure for managers (and literally everyone up the chain) is to maximize headcount. More people you managed, the more power you have within the organization. No one wants to say on their resume, "I manage 5 people, but trust me, with AI, its like managing 20 people!" Managers also don't pay people's salaries. The Tech Tools budget is a different budget than People salaries. Also keep in mind, for any…

> The incentive structure for managers (and literally everyone up the chain) is to maximize headcount. More people you managed, the more power you have within the organization Ding ding ding! AI can absolutely reduce headcount. It already could 2 years ago, when we were just getting started. At the time I worked at a company that did just that, succesfully automating away thousands of jobs which couldn't pre-LLMs. Th…

> At the time I worked at a company that did just that, succesfully automating away thousands of jobs which couldn't pre-LLMs.

which company is this? surely they wouldve made a big splash for doing something no one else has been able to do.

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

#163

Post by apwell23 » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 12:29 PM UTC

johndhi wrote: post #26

btbuildem wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am still of the conviction that "reducing employee head count" with AI should start at the top of the org chart. The current iterations of AI already talk like the C-suites, and deliver approximately same value. It would provide additional benefits, in that AIs refuse to do unethical things and generally reason acceptably well. The cost cutting would be immense! I am not kidding. In any large corps, the decision ma…

Not a crazy idea. Sergey at Google said it's best at replacing managers fwiw

why isn't he doing it then?

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

#164

Post by aakresearch » Wed, Oct 15, 2025, 11:42 PM UTC

johndhi wrote: post #37

mojuba wrote: post #10

AI 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 op…

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.

Like a proverbial broken clock which shows correct time twice per 24 hours, AI may "show correct time" for 99% of prompts, but doesn't deserve any more trust.

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

#165

Post by deaux » Thu, Oct 16, 2025, 9:42 AM UTC

apwell23 wrote: post #162

deaux wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The incentive structure for managers (and literally everyone up the chain) is to maximize headcount. More people you managed, the more power you have within the organization Ding ding ding! AI can absolutely reduce headcount. It already could 2 years ago, when we were just getting started. At the time I worked at a company that did just that, succesfully automating away thousands of jobs which couldn't pre-LLMs. Th…

> At the time I worked at a company that did just that, succesfully automating away thousands of jobs which couldn't pre-LLMs. which company is this? surely they wouldve made a big splash for doing something no one else has been able to do.

Did you not see the backlash the Duolingo CEO got and how hard he backtracked? Coming out and saying "We're replacing a big bunch of people with LLMs" is about the worst PR you can get in 2025, it's really an wful idea for anyone but maybe pure B2B companies that are barely hanging on and super desperate for investor cash.

This was a big, traditional non-tech company.

Also as implied, these were cheap offshore contracting jobs being replaced. Still magnitudes more expensive than LLMs, making it very "worth it" from a company perspective. But not prime earnings call material.

Everyone in the industry also knows that it's not particularly unique, far away from something no one has been able to do. Go look at the job markets for translation, data entry, customer support compared to 2 years ago. And as mentioned, even junior web devs.