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

What are the actual use cases that can generate revenue or at least save costs today? I can think of:

1. Generate content to create online influence. This is at this point probably way oversaturated and I think more sophisticated models will not make it better.

2. Replace junior developers with Claude Code or similar. Only sort of works. After all, you can only babysit one of these at a time no matter how senior you are so realistically it will make you, what, 50% more productive?

3. Replace your customer service staff. This may work in the long run but it saves money instead of making money so its impact has a hard ceiling (of spending just the cost of electricity).

4. Assistive tools. Someone to do basic analysis, double check your writing to make it better, generate secondary graphic assets. Can save a bit of money but can’t really make you a ton because you are still the limiting factor.

Aside: I have tried it for editing writing and it works pretty well but only if I have it do minimal actual writing. The more words it adds, the worse the essay. Having it point out awkward phrasing and finding missing parts of a theme is genuinely helpful.

5. AI for characters in video games, robot dogs, etc. Could be a brave new frontier for video games that don’t have such a rigid cause/effect quest based system.

6. AI girlfriends and boyfriends and other NSFW content. Probably a good money maker for a decade or so before authentic human connections swing back as a priority over anxiety over speaking to humans.

What use cases am I missing?

One use case I'd love to see an easy plug-and-play solution for is a RAG build around companies vast internal documentation/wikis/codebase to help developers onboard and find information faster. I would love to see less of people trying to replace humans with language models and more of people trying to use language models to make humans jobs less frustrating.