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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: 0.346s | 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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amluto ◴[21 Aug 25 16:48 UTC] No.44974989[source]▶
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.
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1. beart ◴[21 Aug 25 16:57 UTC] No.44975138[source]▶
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 not having any of those things and being difficult to work with.

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2. wl ◴[21 Aug 25 17:23 UTC] No.44975499[source]▶
Charting is for billing. If the point were to have accurate medical records useful for facilitating diagnosis and treatment, we'd structure medical records way differently. Fishing clinically-useful bits of information out of encounter and progress notes is tedious and only done as a last resort.
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3. hinkley ◴[21 Aug 25 17:44 UTC] No.44975785[source]▶
Not just juniors. Industry is full of senior and some staff engineers who see discipline as a waste of time.

The number of things I do in a day that half my coworkers see as a waste of time until they enjoy the outcomes is basically uncountable at this point.

If something is a “waste of time” it’s possible that you’re just lousy at it.

Self reflection is a rarer commodity than it should be. And most of the tasks you list either require or invite it.

4. hinkley ◴[21 Aug 25 17:45 UTC] No.44975796[source]▶
I presume for malpractice suits as well.
5. amluto ◴[21 Aug 25 23:40 UTC] No.44979523[source]▶
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.