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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

#421

Post by johnnyanmac »

rawgabbit wrote: post #402
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…

This stood out to me in the report: A corporate lawyer at a mid-sized firm exemplified this dynamic. Her organization invested $50,000 in a specialized contract analysis tool, yet she consistently defaulted to ChatGPT for drafting work: "Our purchased AI tool provided rigid summaries with limited customization options. With ChatGPT, I can guide the conversation and iterate until I get exactly what I need. The fundame…

>This pattern suggests that a $20-per-month general-purpose tool often outperforms bespoke enterprise systems costing orders of magnitude more

$20/month? Is "mid-sized" different than I imagined, or was this 3-4 years ago? We're already seeing model subscriptions balloon.

I wouldn't be surprised if these approach typical enterprise prices in a few more years.

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

#422

Post by chriskanan »

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…

That's my assessment of the report as well.... really, some news truly is "fake" where they are pushing a narrative that they think will drive clicks and eyeballs, and the media is severely misrepresenting what is in this report.

The failure is not AI, but that a lot of existing employees are not adopting the tools or at least not adopting the tools provided by their company. The "Shadow AI economy" they discuss is a real issue: People are just using their personal subscriptions to LLMs rather than internal company offerings. My university made an enterprise version of ChatGPT available to all students, faculty, and staff so that it can be used with data that should not be used with cloud-based LLMs, but it lacks a lot of features and has many limitations compared to, for example, GPT-5. So, adoption and retention of users of that system is relatively low, which is almost surely due to its limitations compared to cloud-based options. Most use-cases don't necessarily involve data that would be illegal to use with a cloud-based system.

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

#423

Post by tux3 »

missedthecue wrote: post #386
tux3 wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But I think this comes back to the same question of understaffing/overwork. We have to ask what strategic thinking led to accept long response times in the past. And the answer is unequivocal. Unless we're claiming there is an intractable qualified labor shortage in call centers, this is always the result of a much simpler explanation: it's much cheaper to understaff call centers A company that wants to save money by…

OK, but in that case, we reach status quo but with fewer employees. Doesn't that meet your definition of efficiency gains?

Yep. I was arguing that in this case more efficiency means you can't need as many jobs as you would otherwise. That does meet my definition of efficiency gain if there are fewer employees. Whether that's a good thing and for whom is another question.

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

#424

Post by kmarc »

varispeed wrote: post #11

The funniest part isn’t that AI hasn’t delivered profits. It’s that the only “value” most people got from LLMs was accidentally rediscovering what Google used to be before it turned into an ad-riddled casino. Executives mistook that novelty for a business revolution. After years of degraded search, SEO spam, and “zero-click” answers, suddenly ChatGPT spat out a coherent paragraph and everyone thought: my god, the fut…

While you are being downvoted here, I would like to express how much I liked how this thought summarized some of the pain points I have to deal with: (regardless of AI):

> they’re faithfully mirroring the mediocrity of the organisation

This is happening with to technologies / tools / etc...

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

#425

Post by amluto »

beart wrote: post #176
amluto wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d like to see a competent AI replace the time that doctors and nurses spend tediously transcribing notes into a medical record system. More time spent doing the actual job is good for pretty much everyone.

But... that is the actual job. A clear medical history is very important, and I'm not ready yet to cut out my doctor from that process. This reminds me of the way juniors tend to think about things. That is, writing code is "the actual job" and commit messages, documentation, project tracking, code review, etc. are tedious chores that get in the way. Of course, there is no end to the complaints of legacy code bases n…

Making notes is fine. When a nurse watches a patient in a hospital for an hour and spends 45 of those minutes awkwardly typing into the record system and therefore can’t actually attend to the patient, something is wrong.

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

#426

Post by therealpygon »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #420
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…

> AI would offer automation equaling $2.3 trillion in labor value affecting 39 million positions But >Current automation potential: 2.27% of U.S. labor value Given the US GDP right now is 27 trillion, I'm not sure if this is really mathing out in my head. Wwe're going to potentially optimize 61 billion dollars of US labor value while displacing some 15% of the American labor force, and return back 2.3 trillion in val…

I’m not sure how you got that 2.2% of 18.5 trillion in GDP attributed to labor is 61 billion, so I’d agree that math doesn’t seem accurate.

Additionally, you seemed to have pulled the cherry-picked quote and compared with the “current” impact and ignored the immediately following text on latent automation exposure (partially extracted for quote) that explains how it could have a greater impact that results in their 2.3t/39m estimate numbers. Seems odd to find those numbers in the report but not read the rest of the same section.

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

#427

Post by johnnyanmac »

therealpygon wrote: post #426
johnnyanmac wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI would offer automation equaling $2.3 trillion in labor value affecting 39 million positions But >Current automation potential: 2.27% of U.S. labor value Given the US GDP right now is 27 trillion, I'm not sure if this is really mathing out in my head. Wwe're going to potentially optimize 61 billion dollars of US labor value while displacing some 15% of the American labor force, and return back 2.3 trillion in val…

I’m not sure how you got that 2.2% of 18.5 trillion in GDP attributed to labor is 61 billion, so I’d agree that math doesn’t seem accurate. Additionally, you seemed to have pulled the cherry-picked quote and compared with the “current” impact and ignored the immediately following text on latent automation exposure (partially extracted for quote) that explains how it could have a greater impact that results in their 2…

>I’m not sure how you got that 2.2% of 18.5 trillion in GDP attributed to labor is 61 billion

The number I googled for 2024 US GDP was 29.18 trillion, so thats part of it. I'm flexibke enough to adjust that if wrong.

>Additionally, you seemed to have pulled the cherry-picked quote and compared with the “current” impact and ignored the immediately following text on latent automation exposure

There's no time scale presented in that section thst I can find for the "latent" exposure, so its not very useful as presented. That's why I compared it to now.

Over 5 years; I'm not sure but it can be realistic. Over 20 years, If the US GDP doesn't absolutely tank, that's not necessary as impressive a number as it sounds. You see my confusion here?

>that explains how it could have a greater impact that results in their 2.3t/39m estimate numbers.

Maybe I need to read more of the article, but I need a lot more numbers to be convinced of a 40x efficiency boost (predicted returns divided by current gdp value times their 2.2% labor value) for anything. Even the 20x number if I used your gpd number is a hefty claim.

>Or presented a better metric than my formula above on interpreting "impact". I'm open to a better model here than my napkin math.

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

#428

Post by c0nducktr »

cube00 wrote: post #113
generic92034 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not going to replace anyone's job. Is it not, in the scenario you are describing? You are saying the agents are free now to do higher-value work. Why were there not enough agents before, especially if higher-value work was not done?

It's such a useless platitude. The "higher value work" is answer more calls so we can have less staff on queue.

Exactly. The only thing this does is allows the company to have fewer staff while making the jobs of the few who remain worse. Great product, can't imagine why the general public aren't thrilled about 'AI'.

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

#429

Post by doorhammer »

ponector wrote: post #417
doorhammer wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, I fully agree that we should be aware how AI use is impacting front-line agents--honestly, I'd bet AI is overall a bad thing in most cases--but that's just a gut feeling. That said, it's possible the agents weren't given extra time to make notes about calls and write summaries; often they're not. You usually have different states you can be in as a call center agent. Something like: "On a call", "Available to tak…

>> It's entirely possible that offloading that task to an LLM gives agents _more_ breathing room In theory, yes. But there is no way they are going to save millions by giving more breathing room to agents.

As a whole the incentives of capitalism are aligned as you suggest, but every major corp I've worked with has not-so-rare pockets of savvy middle managers that know how to play the game and also care about the welfare of their employees--even if the cultural incentives don't lean that way. (I'm assuming a US market here--and I'm at least tangentially aware that other cultures aren't identical)

E.g., when I worked in call centers I was directly part of initiatives that saved millions and made agents lives better, with an intentionality toward both outcomes.

I also saw people drive agents into the ground trying to maximize utilization and/or schedule adherence with total disregard for the negative morale and business value they were pushing.

It makes me wonder if there are any robust org psych studies about the prevalence and success of middle managers trying to strategically navigate those kinds of situations to benefit their employees. I'd bet it's more rare than not, but I have no idea by how much.

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

#430

Post by franktankbank »

chriskanan wrote: post #422
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…

That's my assessment of the report as well.... really, some news truly is "fake" where they are pushing a narrative that they think will drive clicks and eyeballs, and the media is severely misrepresenting what is in this report. The failure is not AI, but that a lot of existing employees are not adopting the tools or at least not adopting the tools provided by their company. The "Shadow AI economy" they discuss is a…

Absolutely, its a failure of the workers.
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