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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

#291

Post by chasd00 »

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…

so you're saving 3-5 minutes per agent per call. I'm guessing calls come into a queue and then the next available agent starts to handle it. If an average call takes about 20min until the agent hangs up and is free for another then after about 5 calls they've saved enough time to take an extra call they wouldn't have before. 5 calls is 1.4 hrs on the phone, i'm guessing with breaks and call center reps not being 100% on the ball all the time then your agents probably will take maybe 3-4 more calls per day with the AI than without (assuming call volume is such that there are always more calls than agents can handle)

Is that really millions of savings annually? Maybe it is but I always hesitate when a process change that saves one person a few minutes is extrapolated all the way out to dollars/year. What you'll probably see is the agents using those 3-5 minutes to check their phone.

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

#293

Post by jryio »

spogbiper wrote: post #7

Sounds like 95% of companies are potential clients for my consulting services

Started an entire consulting practice to get engineering teams and founders out of vibe coded pits. Even got a great domain for it - vibebusters

So far business is booming and clients are happy with both human interactions with senior engineers as well as a final deliverable on best practices for using AI to write code.

Curious to compare notes

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

#294

Post by doorhammer »

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…

Again, not the OP, so I can't speak to exactly their use-case, but the vast majority of call center calls fall into really clear buckets.

To give you an idea: Phonetic transcription was the "state of the art" when I was a QA analyst. It broke call transcripts apart into a stream of phonemes and when you did a search, it would similarly convert your search into a string of phonemes, then look for a match. As you can imagine, this is pretty error prone and you have to get a little clever with it, but realistically, it was more than good enough for the scale we operated at.

If it were an ecom site you'd already know the categories of calls you're interested in because you've been doing that tracking manually for years. Maybe something like "late delivery", "broken item", "unexpected out of stock", "missing pieces", etc.

Basically, you'd have a lot of known context to anchor the llms analysis, which would (probably) cover the vast majority of your calls, leaving you freed up to interact with outliers more directly.

At work as a software dev, having an LLM summarize a meeting incorrectly can be really really bad, so I appreciate the point you're making, but at a call center for an f500 company you're looking for trends and you're aware of your false positive/negative rates. Realistically, those can be relatively high and still provide a lot of value.

Also, if it's a really large company, they almost certainly had someone validate the calls, second-by-second, against the summaries (I know because that was my job for a period of time). That's a minimum bar for _any_ call analysis software so you can justify the spend. Sure, it's possible that was hand-waved, but as the person responsible for the outcome of the new summarization technique with LLMs, you'd be really screwing yourself to handwave a product that made you measurably less effective. There are better ways to integrate the AI hype train into a QA department than replacing the foundation of your analysis, if that's all you're trying to do.

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

#295

Post by ozgung »

So, on August 21, 2025, everyone in the world suddenly decided that AI was a bubble, no matter what day had said the day before. And they decided to start a PR campaign to announce this to the general public. CEOs were overselling, now they are underselling (their job is to sell).

What's going on? I find all of these pretty sus.

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

#296

Post by gmd63 »

belter wrote: post #137
gmd63 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The law firms failed to do so.

Some of them have certainly flagged themselves as opportunistic and myopic.

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

#297

Post by morkalork »

deadbabe wrote: post #261
morkalork wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What’s the ROI?

Transcription cost is a race to the bottom because there's so many vendors competing, same with embeddings. It's positive. Gets better every year.

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

#298

Post by fifilura »

dsr_ wrote: post #221
andix wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am sorry about your bad experience. Maybe the ones you called did not have AI transcribed summaries and were not managed by GP?

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

#299

Post by 0x457 »

ethagknight wrote: post #250
andix wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Im imagining my actual experience of being transferred for the 3rd or 4th time, repeating my name and address for the 3rd or 4th time, restating my problem for the 3rd or 4th time... feels like theres an implementation problem, not a technological problem. Quick and accurate routing and triage of inbound calls may be more fruitful and far easier than summarizing hundreds of hours of "ok now plug the router back into…

Also waiting music being interrupted every minute to tell:

1) my call is very important to them (it's not)

2) listen carefully because options changed (when? 5 years ago?)

3) they have a website where I can do things (you can't, otherwise why would I call?)

4) please stay at the end of call to give them feedback (sure, I will waste more of my time)

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

#300

Post by herval »

belter wrote: post #73
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…

Prepare for the crash: "Spending on AI data centers is so massive that it’s taken a bigger chunk of GDP growth than shopping" - https://fortune.com/2025/08/06/data-center-artificial-intell...

This is such a huge repeat of the early 2000s. All the bust startups spent billions in infrastructure. Everyone built their own datacenters, no matter what your business is.

We'll either see a new class of "AWS of AI" companies that'll survive and be used by everyone (that's part of the play Anthropic & OpenAI are making, despite API generating a fraction of their current revenue), or Amazon + Google + Microsoft will remain as the undisputed leaders.

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