"I'm sure my company is among the 5% of superusers," said CEO Chad "Bro" Brochad, who later admitted he had not checked.
95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend
61–70 of 445 posts
Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend
#62This is why it's so good to sell shovels, so-to-speak. In this case, that's NVDA
or steel and wood for making shovels, TSMC
Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend
#63We 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…
Gemini keeps being rather impressive though, even their iterative updates have improvements, though I'm seeing a significant slowdown in the improvements (both quantity and in how much they improve) suggestion a wall may be approaching.
That said, technologies like this can also go through a rollercoaster pattern itself. Lots of innovation and improvement, followed by very little improvement but lots of research, which then explodes more improvements.
I think LLMs have a better chance at following that pattern than computer vision did when that hype cycle was all the rage
Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend
#64It’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...
Sometimes it's like an autocomplete on steroids and reads my mind. Other times it suggests things that make no sense and completely gets in the way.
Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend
#65Can you really put a price on a good excuse for layoffs that deflects rancor from employees while sounding like positive news to investors? :p
... Well, probably yes, but I don't have the data to do it.
Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend
#66The link to the report pdf redirects to a landing page[1] that makes me think this "study" is run-of-the-mill content marketing. The CTA at the bottom of the page says "Join the Revolution / Be at the forefront of creating the agentic web. Get exposure and faster adoption for your AI products and tools," which certainly doesn't give the impression that this is an objective report. Either way I can't speak to the quality of the study directly because it is walled off behind a contact information form, which is another bad sign.
From the article though:
> But researchers found most use cases were limited to boosting individual productivity rather than improving a company’s overall profits.
What does that even mean?
[1] Website: https://nanda.media.mit.edu/, FAQ: https://projnanda.github.io/projnanda/#/faq_nanda
Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend
#67I mean of course they aren't. So many people are offering so much stuff for free or at a pittance.
I honestly don't think it matters though. Feel free to disagree with me but I think the money is irrelevant.
The only thing that actually matters is the long run is the attention, time, and brain space of other people. After all that's where fiat currency actually derives it's value. These Gen AI companies have captured a lot of that extremely quickly.
OpenAI might have "burned" billions but they way they have wrung themselves into seemingly every university student's computer, every CEOs mind, the policy decisions of world leaders, ever other hackernews post, is nothing short of miraculous...
Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend
#68It HAS lead to widespread enshitification of products and services though!
Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend
#69The biggest mistake people are making is treating AI as a product instead of a feature. While people are doing their work, they don't think, "Oh man, I am really excited to talk with AI today, and I can't wait to talk with a chatbot." People want to do their jobs without being too bored and overwhelmed, and that's where AI comes in. But of course, we cannot hype features; we sell products after all, so that's the sta…
I wouldn't mind it if it were presented as yet another tool in the box. Maybe have a one-time popup saying "Hey, there's this thing, here's a cool use case, go check it out on your own terms."
In reality, AI sparkles and logos and autocompletes are everywhere. It's distracting. It makes itself the star of the show instead of being a backup dancer to my work. It could very well have some useful applications, but that's for users to decide and adapt to their particular needs. The ham-fisted approach of shoving it into every UI front-and-center signals a gross sense of desperation, neediness, and entitlement. These companies need to learn how to STFU sometimes.
Re: 95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend
#70Full 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.