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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

#191

Post by tux3 »

flkiwi wrote: post #178
tux3 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's a huge, measurable efficiency gain. > It's not going to replace anyone's job Mechanically, more efficiency means less people required for the same output. I understand there is no evidence that any other sentence can be written about jobs. Still, you should put more text in between those two sentences. Reading them so close together creates audible dissonance.

You're not accounting for teams already being understaffed and overtasked in many situations, with some AI tools allowing people to get back to doing their jobs. We aren't expecting significant headcount changes, but we are expecting significant performance and quality improvements for the resources we have.

The reason that caused the team to be understaffed and overtasked has not gone away because of AI. I am expecting the team to stay understaffed and overtasked, for the same reason it was before: it's less expensive. With or without an LLM summarizing phone calls.

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

#192

Post by empath75 »

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.

There were similar headlines in the late 80s and early 90s as IT in general was widely seen to have been a money wasting bust. Most people who try to use new technologies, especially early adopters waste a shitload of money and don't accomplish very much.

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

#193

Post by wredcoll »

butlike wrote: post #92
throitallaway wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I presume they're not using these notes for anything mission or life critical, so anything less than 100% accuracy is OK.

I disagree with the concept of affluvic notes. All notes are intrinsically actionable; it's why they're a note in the first place. Any note has unbounded consequence depending on the action taken from it.

You're being downvoted, I suspect for being a tad hyperbolic, but I think you are raising a really important point, which is just the ever more gradual of removing a human's ability to disobey the computer system running everything. And the lack of responsibility for following computer instructions.

It's a tad far-fetched in this specific scenario, but an AI summary that says something like "cancel the subscription for user xyz" and then someone else takes action on that, and XYZ is the wrong ID, what happens?

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

#195

Post by spogbiper »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #157
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.…

Isn’t that something you can do with non ai tooling to 100% accuracy?

in some similar cases yes, and this client has tried to accomplish that for literally decades without success. i don't want to be too detailed for reasons, but basically they cannot standardize the input to the point where anything non AI has been able to parse it very well.

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

#196

Post by zeromyte »

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…

[dead]

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

#197

Post by wredcoll »

dingnuts wrote: post #104
lenerdenator wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also wouldn't be surprised if bean counters were expecting a return in an unreasonable amount of time. "Hey, guys, listen, I know that this just completely torched decades of best practices in your field, but if you can't show me progress in a fiscal year, I have to turn it down." - some MBA somewhere, probably, trying and failing yet again to rub his two brain cells together for the first time since high school. J…

Sam Altman and company have been promising full on AGI. THAT'S the price shock. Agents may be good (I haven't seen it yet, maybe it's a skill issue but I'm not spending hundreds of dollars to find out and my company seems reluctant to spend thousands to find out) but they are definitely, definitely not general superintelligence like SamA has been promising at all really is sinking in these might be useful tools, yes,…

It's real good for stock prices though. Reminds me of tesla.

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

#198

Post by Spivak »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #117
lenerdenator wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also wouldn't be surprised if bean counters were expecting a return in an unreasonable amount of time. "Hey, guys, listen, I know that this just completely torched decades of best practices in your field, but if you can't show me progress in a fiscal year, I have to turn it down." - some MBA somewhere, probably, trying and failing yet again to rub his two brain cells together for the first time since high school. J…

"Actually its good we aren't making money, this actually proves how revolutionary the technology is. You really need to think about adapting to our new timeline." You really set yourself up with a nice glass house trying to make fun of the money guys when you are essentially just moving your own goal posts. It was annoying two (or three?) years ago when we were all talking about replacing doctors and lawyers, now it…

How dare the business ask for receipts of value being produced in actual dollars! Those idiots don't know anything.

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

#199

Post by shantara »

kingkawn wrote: post #105
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…

#5 is an enormous use case that when well implemented will permanently replace prescribed character arcs It is uniquely susceptible because the gaming market is well acclimated to mediocre writing and one dimensional character development that’s tacked on to a software product, so the improvements of making “thinking” improvisational characters can be immense. Another revenue potential you’ve missed is visual effects…

>#5 is an enormous use case that when well implemented will permanently replace prescribed character arcs

I mostly disagree. Every gaming AI character demo I've seen so far is just adds more irrelevant filler dialogue between the player and the game they want to play. It's the same problem that some of the older RPG games had, thinking that 4 paragraphs of text is always better than 1.

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

#200

Post by ninininino »

krainboltgreene wrote: post #168
alooPotato wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you want to be able to search over summaries so you need to generate them right away

Pro-tip: You won't ever do that.

Advanced organizations (think not startups, but companies that have had years of decades of profit in the public market) might have solved all the low-hanging fruit problems and have staff doing things like automated quality audits (search summaries for swearing, abusive language, etc).
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