←back to thread

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: 0.261s | source
Show context
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.

replies(39): >>44974847 #>>44974853 #>>44974860 #>>44974865 #>>44974867 #>>44974868 #>>44974869 #>>44974874 #>>44974876 #>>44974877 #>>44974901 #>>44974905 #>>44974906 #>>44974907 #>>44974929 #>>44974933 #>>44974951 #>>44974977 #>>44974989 #>>44975016 #>>44975021 #>>44975040 #>>44975093 #>>44975126 #>>44975142 #>>44975193 #>>44975225 #>>44975251 #>>44975268 #>>44975271 #>>44975292 #>>44975458 #>>44975509 #>>44975544 #>>44975548 #>>44975622 #>>44975923 #>>44976668 #>>44977281 #
1. ethagknight ◴[21 Aug 25 17:19 UTC] No.44975458[source]▶
This highlights the potentially unrealistic spend on AI, where the proposal is to spend 10s of millions to save... marginal millions... that could have also been saved by a change in process with limited additional spend.

I also would assume that there are far more significant behavioral or human factors that consume the time writing those minutes, i.e. an easy spot to kill 5-10 min before opening the line for the next inbound call, but the 5-10 minute break will persist anyway.

I fully believe AI will create a lot of value and is revolutionary, especially for industries where value is hidden within data. Its the pace of value creation that stands out to me (how long til its actually useful and better and creates more value than it costs??) but the bubble factor is not ignorable on the near term.