Live data from Hacker News

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

thedailyadda.com

91–100 of 445 posts

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

#91
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yo what’s the next hype cycle that smart folks like us should be working on?

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.

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

#92
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you double-check the work? Also, what happens when the AI transcription is wrong in a way that would have terminated the employee. You can't fire a model. Finally, who cares about millions saved (while considering the above introduced risk), when trillions are on the line?

I presume they're not using these notes for anything mission or life critical, so anything less than 100% accuracy is OK.

I disagree with the concept of affluvic notes. All notes are intrinsically actionable; it's why they're a note in the first place. Any note has unbounded consequence depending on the action taken from it.

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

#93
post #79
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…

You could do that offline 20 years ago with Dragon Naturally Speaking and a one-time licence.

You could get a transcript, not a summary

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

#94
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…

At work we've tried AI summaries for meetings, but we spent so much time fixing those summaries that we started writing our own again. Is there some training you applied or something specific to your use case that makes it work for you?

We stopped after it kept transcribing a particular phrase of domain jargon as “child p*rn”, again and again.

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

#96
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.

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

#97
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…

Are the summaries reviewed by the agents? And if not how do you handle hallucinations, or transcribe of wrong insurance policy id for example? Like, customer wants to cancel insurance policy AB-2345D and transcribe says wants to cancel insurance policy AD-2345B

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

#98
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…

> agents were previously spending 3-5 minutes after each call writing manual summaries of the calls

Why were they doing this at all? It may not be what is happening in this specific case but a lot of the AI business cases I've seen are good automations of useless things. Which makes sense because if you're automating a report that no one reads the quality of the output is not a problem and it doesn't matter if the AI gets things wrong.

In operations optimization there's a saying to not go about automating waste, cut it out instead. A lot of AI I suspect is being used to paper over wasteful organization of labor. Which is fine if it turns out we just aren't able to do those optimizations anyway.

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

#99
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…

Who reads the summaries? Are they even useful to begin with? Or did this just save everyone 3-5 minutes of meaningless work?

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

#100
post #77
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…

How can you double-check the work? Also, what happens when the AI transcription is wrong in a way that would have terminated the employee. You can't fire a model. Finally, who cares about millions saved (while considering the above introduced risk), when trillions are on the line?

Having a human read a summary is way faster than getting them to write it. If they want to edit it, they can.

AI today is terrible at replacing humans, but OK at enhancing them.

Everyone who gets that is going to find gains - real gains, and fast - and everyone who doesn't, is going to end up spending a lot of money getting into an almost irreversible mistake.

Post reply on HN