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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

#181

Post by biophysboy »

md3911027514 wrote: post #50

It’s interesting how self-reports of productivity can be wrong. For example a study from METR found that developers felt that AI sped them up by 20%, but it empirically it slowed them down by 19%. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-o...

I sort of wonder if AI pushes people to stay "in the weeds". I've noticed that the speed of my software development hinges a lot on decisions that require me to take a step back (e.g. Am I using the right tool? Is this feature necessary? etc)

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

#182

Post by turnsout »

The AI wave is so reminiscent of the early days of the internet. Right now we're in about 1999, a time of tremendous hype. Business that weren't even in tech were wondering how much they need to know about the HTTP spec. People from the marketing team were being pulled off their print ad campaigns, given a copy of Dreamweaver, and told to make the company website. We hadn't even figured out the roles.

It 100% turned out to be a bubble and yet, if anything, the internet was under-hyped. The problem in 1999 was that no one really knew how it was going to play out. Which investments would be shrewd in retrospect, and which ones would be a money pit?

When an innovation hits, it takes time to figure out whether you're selling buggy whips, or employing drivers who can drive any vehicle.

Plenty of companies sunk way too much money into custom websites back in 99, but would we say they were wrong to do it? They may have overspent at a time when a website couldn't justify the ROI within 12 months, but how could they know? A few short years later, a website was virtually required for every business.

So are companies really seeing "zero return" on their AI spend, or are they paying for valuable lessons about how AI applies to their businesses? There may be zero ROI today, but all you need to do is look at the behavior of normal people to see that AI is not going anywhere. Smart companies are experimenting.

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

#183

Post by nulbyte »

pedrocr wrote: post #98
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…

> agents were previously spending 3-5 minutes after each call writing manual summaries of the calls Why were they doing this at all? It may not be what is happening in this specific case but a lot of the AI business cases I've seen are good automations of useless things. Which makes sense because if you're automating a report that no one reads the quality of the output is not a problem and it doesn't matter if the AI…

As a customer of many companies who has also worked in call centers, I can't tell you how frustrating it is when I, as a customer, have to call back and the person I speak with has no record or an insufficient record of my last call. This has required me to repeat myself, resend emails, and wait all over again.

It was equally frustrating when I, as a call center worker, had to ask the custmer to tell me what should already have been noted. This has required me to apologize and to do someone else's work in addition to my own.

Summarizing calls is not a waste, it's just good business.

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

#184

Post by foxfired »

Atlassian added this new AI feature to create audio summaries of Confluence documents. It's really impressive. No one reads documentation. I know it because I'll send someone a documentation, then they'll ask me a question that is answered in the second paragraph, meaning they didn't read it.

So their feature is not just text to speech, but a reading of a summarized version of the articles. But here is the problem. The documentation has no fluff. You don't want a summary, you want the actual details. When you are reading the document that describes how the recovery fee is calculated, you want to know exactly how it is calculated.

I've ran it on multiple documents and it misses key information. An unsuspecting user might take it at face value. So this feature looks impressive, but it misses the entire point of documentation. Which is *preserving the details*.

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

#185

Post by VerminOctopus1 »

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…

Even “only sort of works” is too generous for point #2. A dozen Claude Code agents spamming out code is… something. But it still does not replace a human, at all, even a junior one. It’s something else entirely.

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

#186

Post by spogbiper »

systemerror wrote: post #164
spogbiper wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

The big issue with LLMs is that they’re usually right — like 90% of the time — but that last 10% is tough to fix. A 10% failure rate might sound small, but at scale, it's significant — especially when it includes false positives. You end up either having to live with some bad results, build something to automatically catch mistakes, or have a person double-check everything if you want to bring that error rate down.

yes, the entire design relies on a human to check everything. basically it presents what it thinks should be done, and why. the human then agrees or does not. much work is put into streamlining this but ultimately its still human controlled

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

#187

Post by [deleted] »

ta20240528 wrote: post #49
eldenring wrote: post #29

This is how America ends up being ahead of the rest of world with every new technology breakthrough. They spend a lot of money, lose a lot of money, take risks, and then end up being too far for others to catch up. Trying to claim victory against AI/US Companies this early is a dangerous move.

> This is how America ends up being ahead of the rest of world with every new technology breakthrough. Too young to remember GSM?

[deleted]

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

#189

Post by the_snooze »

ghalvatzakis wrote: post #172
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…

I lead an AI engineering team that automated key parts of an interviewing process, saving thousands of hours each month by handling thousands of interviews. This reduced repetitive, time-consuming tasks and freed human resources to focus on higher-value work

I'm under the impression that one of the most critical responsibilities a lead has is to establish and maintain a good working culture. Properly vetting new additions feeds directly into that. Why offload it to AI?

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

#190

Post by prophesi »

nuker wrote: post #147
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…

> recently switched to using AI to transcribe and write these summaries Did users knew that conversation was recorded?

You would be hard-pressed to find a call center that _doesn't_ start every phone call with a warning that the conversation may be recorded.
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