95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by thfuran » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:20 PM UTC

Spivak wrote: post #174

paulddraper wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This works unless you want to automate something with the transcripts, stats, feedback.

Why wouldn't it, once you actually have that project you have the raw audio to generate the transcripts. Only spend the money at the last second when you know you need it. Edit: Tell me more how preemptively spending five figures to transcribe and summarize calls in case you might want to do some "data engineering" on it later is a sound business decision. What if the model is cheaper down the road? YAGNI.

A company that could save millions by not having staff write up their own call notes almost surely is already doing that.

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

#272

Post by Thrymr » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:21 PM UTC

rconti wrote: post #116

I'm no AI apologist, but for one, this is how investments, particularly speculative investments, work. They're investing money now in the _hopes_ of a future return. It's pretty early days still. Secondly, of _course_ the huge AI players are doing everything they can to overpromise and convince corporations to throw cash at them to keep the party going. I think the real problem is, it's just a bit too early, but ever…

It is rare that a third of the capital in the US stock market (by some recent estimates) is going for essentially the same speculative bet, though.

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

#273

Post by lacy_tinpot » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:22 PM UTC

exasperaited wrote: post #236

lacy_tinpot wrote: post #39

Why do people so desperately want to see AI fail?

[removed]

The real evil people here are the "artists" that have this kind of attitude. I still remember the "Digital Art isn't real Art" people, which btw still exist among your snobby "Fine Arts" crowds.

I think we should actually ban all digital art platforms, no Photoshop, no special effects, all hand drawn. And I'll use some weird weaponized empathy calling out for the human soul and human creativity.

What a toxic bunch.

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

#274

Post by didibus » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:22 PM UTC

resiros wrote: post #224

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…

> affecting 39 million positions

Wow, that is crazy. There's 163 million working Americans, that's close to a quarter of the workforce is at risk.

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

#275

Post by paul7986 » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:22 PM UTC

Present day AI (chatGPT 5) is not a complete graphic/web designer or front-end developer. My job and skills are safe from it as it can't...

- Make edits to the solid looking logos & web designs it spits out. Instead it creates brand new logos and designs ..not what i asked it to do!

- Front end code it doesn't spit a zip file with all the images. It does speed up my design/development (I use code to design) process where I use to design/develop in the browser using a bootstrap template.

Maybe it will finally figure it out and or maybe its just the Wizard of Oz .. a facade that grabs designs off the web and mixes some up but can never make edits.

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

#276

Post by la_fayette » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:22 PM UTC

doorhammer wrote: post #205

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.

Sentiment analysis, nuanced categorization by issue, detecting new issues, tracking trends, etc, are the bread and butter of any data team at a f500 call center. I'm not going to say every project born out of that data makes good business sense (big enough companies have fluff everywhere), but ime anyway, projects grounded to that kind of data are typically some of the most straight-forward to concretely tie to a dol…

Yes that sound like important and useful use cases. However, these are solved by boring old school ML models since years...

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

#277

Post by herval » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:22 PM UTC

gmd63 wrote: post #91

belter wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US mix of government and enterprise. You want Capital you need to be MAGA "Donald Trump and Silicon Valley's Billionaire Elegy" - https://www.wired.com/story/donald-trump-and-silicon-valleys... "Secret White House spreadsheet ranks US companies based on loyalty to Trump" - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/08/15/secret-white...

Smartest people will be working against that. You're thinking of opportunistic people with myopia.

Pretty much the entire tech industry has bent the knee by now - they even gifted the new ruler with golden statues. It's not just a handful of people...

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

#278

Post by roywiggins » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:23 PM UTC

sillyfluke wrote: post #257

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.

You also will have saved them all the cost of the AI summaries that are incorrect as well. The parent states: >Not only are the summaries better than those produced by our human agents... Now, since they have not mentioned what it took to actually verify that the AI summaries were in fact better than the human agents, I'm sceptical they did the necessary due dillengence. Why do I think this? Because I have actually t…

In the context of call centers in particular I actually can believe that a moderately inaccurate AI model could be better on average than harried humans writing a summary after the call. Could a human do better carefully working off a recording, absolutely, but that's not what needs to be compared against.

It just has to be as good as a call center worker with 3-5 minutes working off their own memory of the call, not as good as the ground truth of the call. It's probably going to make weirder mistakes when it makes them though.

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

#279

Post by dr_dshiv » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:23 PM UTC

seydor wrote: post #3

I'm confused, which point of the hype cycle is this?

Man, if people aren’t on the plateau of productivity by now with genai, it’s their own damn fault. Trough of disillusionment was like, 2020 AI projects.

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

#280

Post by LPisGood » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 5:23 PM UTC

wheelerwj wrote: post #208

My guess is that this title could also be written as, “The value of AI projects are being captured by just 5% of companies.” It’s pretty clear to anyone who’s using this technology that it’s significant. Theres still tons to work out and the exact impact is still unknown. But this cat isn’t going back in the bag.

> It’s pretty clear to anyone who’s using this technology that it’s significant

I disagree entirely. It’s neat, and it’s a marginal improvement over current-year google, but significant is an overstatement.