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

(thedailyadda.com)
418 points speckx | 7 comments | 21 Aug 25 15:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.665s | source | bottom
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jawns ◴[21 Aug 25 16:36 UTC] No.44974805[source]▶
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 using AI to transcribe and write these summaries. Not only are the summaries better than those produced by our human agents, they also free up the human agents to do higher-value work.

It's not sexy. It's not going to replace anyone's job. But it's a huge, measurable efficiency gain.

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1. doubled112 ◴[21 Aug 25 16:40 UTC] No.44974853[source]▶
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?

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2. nsxwolf ◴[21 Aug 25 16:43 UTC] No.44974899[source]▶
We stopped after it kept transcribing a particular phrase of domain jargon as “child p*rn”, again and again.
3. cube00 ◴[21 Aug 25 16:44 UTC] No.44974917[source]▶
Unless a case goes down the legal road, nobody is ever bothering to read old call summaries in a giant call center.

When was the last time you called a large company and the person answering was already across all the past history without you giving them a case number first?

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4. doubled112 ◴[21 Aug 25 16:45 UTC] No.44974932[source]▶
Does an AI summary hold up in court? Or would you still need to review a transcript or recording anyway?
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5. cube00 ◴[21 Aug 25 16:48 UTC] No.44974995{3}[source]▶
You can store low quality audio cheaply on cold storage so I suspect that's the real legal record if it got that far.
6. shawabawa3 ◴[21 Aug 25 16:50 UTC] No.44975025[source]▶
My guess is that the summaries are never actually read, so accuracy doesn't actually matter and the AI could equally be replaced with /dev/null
7. mrweasel ◴[21 Aug 25 17:43 UTC] No.44975759[source]▶
We tried Otter.ai, someone complained and asked: "Could you f-ing not? I don't trust them" and now Otter is accused of training their models on recorded meetings without permission. Yeah, I don't even care if it works, I don't trust any of these companies.