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

(thedailyadda.com)
418 points speckx | 5 comments | 21 Aug 25 15:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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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. generic92034 ◴[21 Aug 25 16:41 UTC] No.44974868[source]▶
> 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?

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2. hobs ◴[21 Aug 25 16:42 UTC] No.44974886[source]▶
Because call centers are cost centers - nobody pays a dime more than they have to in these situations and its all commodity work.
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3. cube00 ◴[21 Aug 25 16:45 UTC] No.44974945[source]▶
It's such a useless platitude. The "higher value work" is answer more calls so we can have less staff on queue.
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4. generic92034 ◴[21 Aug 25 16:47 UTC] No.44974964[source]▶
But that means the so-called "higher-value" work does not need to be done, so agents can be fired.
5. c0nducktr ◴[22 Aug 25 01:10 UTC] No.44980074[source]▶
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'.