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

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.

I wonder if the human agents agree the AI summaries are better than their summaries. I was nodding as I read and then told myself "yeah but it wouldn't be able to summarize the meetings I have", so I wonder if this only works in 3rd person.

Part of me also wonders if people may agree that its better simply because they don't actually have to do the summarization anymore. Even if it is worse by some %, that is an annoying task you are no longer responsible for; if anything goes wrong down the line, "ah the AI must've screwed up" is your way out.

I’m inclined to believe that call center employees don’t have a lot of incentive to do a good job/care, so a lossy AI could quite plausibly be higher quality than a human