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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

#341

Post by timeinput »

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.

So are call trees where you have to answer yes / no to a decision tree (and can't press 0 / 1, you have to verbalize "yes" or "no"). Those continue to exist, so I expect AI customer 'service' to be very frustrating to work with for quite some time.

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

#342

Post by mrweasel »

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…

Part of the issue with all this AI hype is that I can't tell if you're joking or not. Most of those suggestions are horrible, 4 and 5 makes sense.

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

#343

Post by missedthecue »

tux3 wrote: post #96
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…

> 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.

"Mechanically, more efficiency means less people required for the same output."

Why can't it mean more output with the same number of people? If I pay 100 people for 8 hours of labor a day, and after making some changes to our processes, the volume of work completed is up 10% per day, what is that if not an efficiency gain? What would you call it?

It really depends on the amount of work. If the demand for your labor is infinite, or at least always more than you can do in a days work, efficiency gains won't result in layoffs, just more work completed per shift. If the demand for the work is limited, efficiency gains will likely result in layoffs because there's no point in paying someone who was freed up by your new processes to sit around twirling a pen all day.

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

#345

Post by carlosjobim »

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…

The most important use for AI is for translation. Now anybody can communicate and serve customers and clients from everywhere in the world, and you can also translate all your customer-facing material into any language in the world.

That means you expand from millions to billions of potential customers.

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

#346

Post by prashantsengar »

esafak wrote: post #309
la_fayette wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's easier and simpler to use an LLM service than to maintain those ad hoc models. Many replaced their old NLP pipelines with LLMs.

The place I work at, we replaced our old NLP pipelines with LLMs because they are easier to maintain and reach the same level of accuracy with much less work.

We are not running a call centre ourselves but we are a SaaS offering the services for call centre data analysis.

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

#347

Post by mjcohen »

jcims wrote: post #169
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.

I built a little solution to record and transcribe all of my own meetings. I have many meetings (30hr week+) and I can't keep pace with adequate note-taking while participating in them all. I'm finding that the summarization of individual meetings very useful, I'm also finding that the ability to send in transcripts across meetings, departments, initiatives whatever to be very effective at surfacing subtexts and comm…

Make sure that is legal where you are and, if needed, you have their permission.

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

#348

Post by dang »

vdupras wrote: post #59
eldenring wrote: post #29

This is how America ends up being ahead of the rest of world with every new technology breakthrough. They spend a lot of money, lose a lot of money, take risks, and then end up being too far for others to catch up. Trying to claim victory against AI/US Companies this early is a dangerous move.

[flagged]

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#349

Post by sigmoid10 »

jordanb wrote: post #140
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…

We use Google meet and it has Gemini transcriptions of our meetings. They are hilariously inaccurate. They confuse who said what. They often invert the meaning "Joe said we should go with approach x" where Joe actually said we should not do X. It also lacks context causing it to "mishear" all of our internal jargon to "shit my iPhone said" levels.

That's the difference between having real AI guys and your average linkedIn "AI guys." The other post is a perfect example for a case where you could take a large but still manageable, cutting-edge transcription model like Whisper and fine-tune it using existing hand made transcriptions as ground truth. A match made in heaven for AI engineers. Of course this is going to work way, way better for specific corporate settings than slapping a random closed source general purpose model like Gemini on your task and hoping for the best, just because it achieves X% on random benchmark Y.

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

#350

Post by swader999 »

foxfired wrote: post #184

Atlassian added this new AI feature to create audio summaries of Confluence documents. It's really impressive. No one reads documentation. I know it because I'll send someone a documentation, then they'll ask me a question that is answered in the second paragraph, meaning they didn't read it. So their feature is not just text to speech, but a reading of a summarized version of the articles. But here is the problem. T…

AI reads the docs. For the first time in twenty years I'm actually advocating for more documentation.
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