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

(thedailyadda.com)
418 points speckx | 1 comments | 21 Aug 25 15:36 UTC | HN request time: 0.208s | 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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dsr_ ◴[21 Aug 25 16:42 UTC] No.44974877[source]▶
Pro-tip: don't write the summary at all until you need it for evidence. Store the call audio at 24Kb/s Opus - that's 180KB per minute. After a year or whatever, delete the oldest audio.

There, I've saved you more millions.

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paulddraper ◴[21 Aug 25 16:50 UTC] No.44975017[source]▶
This works unless you want to automate something with the transcripts, stats, feedback.
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Spivak ◴[21 Aug 25 16:57 UTC] No.44975133[source]▶
Why wouldn't it, once you actually have that project you have the raw audio to generate the transcripts. Only spend the money at the last second when you know you need it.

Edit: Tell me more how preemptively spending five figures to transcribe and summarize calls in case you might want to do some "data engineering" on it later is a sound business decision. What if the model is cheaper down the road? YAGNI.

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1. kenjackson ◴[21 Aug 25 17:17 UTC] No.44975423[source]▶
This is the bread and butter of call centers and the companies that use them. The transcripts and summaries are used from everything from product improvement to agent assessment. This data is used continuously. Its not like they use this transcript for the one rare time someone sues because they claim an agent lied. That rarely happens.