Live data from Hacker News

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

thedailyadda.com

261–270 of 445 posts

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

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you want to search summaries, or do you want to save millions of dollars per year?

I can assure you that people care very much about searching and mining calls, especially for compliance and QA reasons.

What’s the ROI?

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

#262
post #139
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.

Also entrenches plausible deniability and makes legal contests way more cumbersome for plantiffs to resolve.

[deleted]

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

#263
post #173

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 suspect there's a lot of nuance you can't really capture in a study like this. How you use AI will depend on the model, the tools (claude-code vs cursor vs w/e), your familiarity and process (planning phases, vibe coding, etc.), and the team size (solo dev versus large team), your seniority and attention to detail, and hard to measure effects like an increased willingness to tackle harder problems you may have proc…

> As someone who knows they are benefitting from AI (study shmuddy)

XD

Look, I get it, I still use it, but you have to admit, people also think that various bogus home remedy totally helps them get over a cold faster. There's absolutely a possibility it in no way makes us faster.

Now, you did say "benefit", that's more broad, and you implied things like polish, I've seen others mention it just makes the work easier, that could be a win in itself (for the workers). Maybe it's about accessibility. Etc.

I do think though, right now, we're all in the "home remedy" territory, until we actually measure these things.

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

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m inclined to believe that call center employees don’t have a lot of incentive to do a good job/care, so a lossy AI could quite plausibly be higher quality than a human

Also it should be easy to correct some obvious mistakes in less convoluted discussions. Also, prob a support call is less complex than eg a group meeting by many aspects, and with a prob larger margin of acceptable errors.

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

#265

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…

> Replace junior developers with Claude Code or similar. I don't know why everyone goes to "replacing". Were a bunch of computer programmers replaced when compilers came out that made writing machine code a lot easier? Of course not, they were more productive and accomplished a lot more, which made them more valuable, not less.

A lot of companies have upper limits on the value add of more programmers.

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

#266

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…

The internet is about sharing actual information. LLMs can't share real information, just a flimsy derivative. It's in their DNA. How so many supposedly smart people who understand machine learning and its fundamental entropy failed to acknowledge this reality from day zero, is beyond me.

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

#267
post #70
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 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.

AI definitely summarizes meetings better than me and _almost_ anyone else I've seen do it (there is one exception -- one guy was a meeting note taker god. He was so good that he set up a mailing list because so many people wanted to read his meeting notes.) I could probably do better than AI if I really tried, but I've only ever done that a few times.

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

#268
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…

This highlights the potentially unrealistic spend on AI, where the proposal is to spend 10s of millions to save... marginal millions... that could have also been saved by a change in process with limited additional spend.

I also would assume that there are far more significant behavioral or human factors that consume the time writing those minutes, i.e. an easy spot to kill 5-10 min before opening the line for the next inbound call, but the 5-10 minute break will persist anyway.

I fully believe AI will create a lot of value and is revolutionary, especially for industries where value is hidden within data. Its the pace of value creation that stands out to me (how long til its actually useful and better and creates more value than it costs??) but the bubble factor is not ignorable on the near term.

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

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m inclined to believe that call center employees don’t have a lot of incentive to do a good job/care, so a lossy AI could quite plausibly be higher quality than a human

For many years now, every time I have to talk with someone on a call centre there has been a survey at the end with at least two questions:

1. Would you recommend us?

2. Was the agent helpful?

I have a friend who used to work at a call centre and would routinely get the lowest marks on the first item and the highest on the second. I do that when the company has been shitty but I understand the person on the line really made an effort to help.

Obviously, those ratings go back to the supervisor and matter for your performance reviews, which can make all the difference between getting a raise or being fired. If anything, call centre employees have a lot of incentive to do a good job if they have any intention of keeping it, because everything they do with a customer is recorded and scrutinised.

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

#270
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…

Good point. I wonder if the Windsurf folks saw the writing on the wall and cashed out when they could.

I was a big Windsurf fan. What they did with their team became a massive cautionary tale around the current wave of startups. It's creating a distrust culture that's gonna be very hard to repair (not that it matters for the handful of newly-minted billionaires)
Post reply on HN