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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

#221

Post by dsr_ »

andix wrote: post #201
dsr_ wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro-tip: don't write the summary at all until you need it for evidence. Store the call audio at 24Kb/s Opus - that's 180KB per minute. After a year or whatever, delete the oldest audio. There, I've saved you more millions.

Imagine a follow-up call of a customer. They are referring to earlier calls and the call center agents needs to check what it was about. So they can skim/read the transcripts while talking to the customer. I guess it's really hard to listen to transcripts while you're on the phone.

That would be awesome!

But in fact, customer call centers tend not to be able to even know that you called in yesterday, three days ago and last week.

This is why email-ticketing call centers are vastly superior.

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

#222

Post by didibus »

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…

Where is the money being saved? Are you reducing the number of agents? Otherwise, it should actually cost more, before you simply had customers wait longer to speak to the next agent no? Or do you sell "support calls" so you're able to sell more of them given the same number of agents?

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

#223

Post by ozgune »

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…

Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941118

It's also disappointing that MIT requires you to fill out a form (and wait for) access to the report. I read four separate stories based on the report, and they all provide a different perspective.

Here's the original pdf before MIT started gating it: https://web.archive.org/web/20250818145714/https://nanda.med...

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

#224

Post by resiros »

Here is the report: https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Bus...

The story there is very different than what's in the article.

Some infos:

- 50% of the budgets (the one that fails) went to marketing and sales

- the authors still see that AI would offer automation equaling $2.3 trillion in labor value affecting 39 million positions

- top barriers for failure is Unwillingness to adopt new tools, Lack of executive sponsorship

Lots of people here are jumping to conclusions. AI does not work. I don't think that's what the report says.

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

#225

Post by siliconc0w »

b8 wrote: post #171
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…

AI Customer Service is very frustrating to work with as a end user.

The problem is that a lot of friction is intentional. Companies want there to be friction to return an item or cancel a subscription. Insurance companies want there to be friction to evaluate policies or appeal denied claims. Companies create legal friction to make competition harder. The friction is the point so AI isn't a solution. If you were to add AI they'd just find a way to create new friction.

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

#226

Post by lacy_tinpot »

jurking_hoff wrote: post #159
lacy_tinpot wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do want a technology that's able to automate human drudgery? Feels like an absurd question.

[dead]

It doesn't because we already know it doesn't because just like think about it and it clearly doesn't. So everyone trying to make the technology is a big dumb dumb for even trying.

Like is the conclusion we shouldn't even try? This kind of thinking ridiculous.

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

#227

Post by evereverever »

mbStavola wrote: post #90
vasco wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the human agents agree the AI summaries are better than their summaries. I was nodding as I read and then told myself "yeah but it wouldn't be able to summarize the meetings I have", so I wonder if this only works in 3rd person.

Part of me also wonders if people may agree that its better simply because they don't actually have to do the summarization anymore. Even if it is worse by some %, that is an annoying task you are no longer responsible for; if anything goes wrong down the line, "ah the AI must've screwed up" is your way out.

That re-synthesis of information is incredibly valuable to storing it in your own memory.

Of course, we can just rely on knowing nothing just to look things up, but I want more for thinking peoples.

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

#228

Post by ghalvatzakis »

the_snooze wrote: post #189
ghalvatzakis wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Just to clarify, these aren’t interviews for job positions

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

#229

Post by Imanari »

actsasbuffoon wrote: post #144
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…

That’s the thing. There’s value in AI, it’s just not worth half a trillion dollars to train a new model that’s 0.4% better on benchmarks. Meta is never going to get a worthwhile return on spending $100M on individual engineers. But that doesn’t mean AI is without its uses. We’re just in that painful phase where the hype needs to die down and we treat LLMs as what they really are; an interesting new tool in the toolki…

Could you broadly describe the AI projects you have built?

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

#230

Post by doorhammer »

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'm curious, have you noticed an impact on agent morale with this?

Specifically: Do they spend more time actually taking calls now? I guess as long as you're not at the burnout point with utilization it's probably fine, but when I was still supporting call centers I can't count the number of projects I saw trying to push utilization up not realizing how real burnout is at call centers.

I assume that's not news to you, of course. At a certain utilization threshold we'd always start to see AHTs creep up as agents got burned out and consciously or not started trying to stay on good calls.

Guess it also partly depends on if you're in more of a cust serv call center or sales.

I hated working as an actual agent on the phones, but call center ops and strategy at scale has always been fascinating.

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