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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 a

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?

b8 1y ago
AI Customer Service is very frustrating to work with as a end user.
- siliconc0w 1y ago
  The problem is that a lot of friction is intentional. Companies want there to be friction to return an item or cancel a subscription. Insurance companies want there to be friction to evaluate policies or appeal denied claims. Companies create legal friction to make competition harder. The friction is the point so AI isn't a solution. If you were to add AI they'd just find a way to create new friction.
- Spivak 1y ago
  I mean look, if the customer service department is just trying to frustrate you into not contacting them then AI is just a new tool in the belt for that. Sad, but improvement for them is explicitly worse for you. But if you're actually trying to provide good customer service because people are paying you for it any paying per case then you wouldn't dare put a phone menu or AI chat bot in-between them and the human. The person handles all the interaction with the client and then uses AI where it's useful to speed up the actual work.
- jmkni 1y ago
  Yep. The thing is, you aren't contacting customer services because everything is going well, you are contacting them because you have a problem. The last thing you need is to be gaslit by an AI. The worst ones are the ones where you don't realise right away you aren't talking to a person, you get that initial hope that you've actually gotten through to someone who can help you (and really quickly too) only to have it dawn on you that you are talking to a ChatGPT wrapper who can't help you at all.
- timeinput 1y ago
  So are call trees where you have to answer yes / no to a decision tree (and can't press 0 / 1, you have to verbalize "yes" or "no"). Those continue to exist, so I expect AI customer 'service' to be very frustrating to work with for quite some time.
wedn3sday 1y ago
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.
- OutOfHere 1y ago
  In all the companies I have worked at and have looked at such docs, unfortunately this doesn't really work because those internal documentation sites are statistically never up to date or even close. They are hilariously unclearly written or out of date. As for relying on the code base, that is good for code, although not for onboarding/deployment/operations/monitoring/troubleshooting that have manual steps.
  - devstein 1y ago
    ^this, but many non-code documents with manual steps can also be kept up-to-date as long as there is a way (a) relate it back to the codebase or another source of truth (b) detect conflicts (when someone says something in contradiction to an existing document) Disclaimer: We are building this at https://dosu.dev https://dosu.dev
- arahman4710 1y ago
  Check out https://asksolo.ai/ https://asksolo.ai/ We connect with slack/notion/code/etc so that you can do the following: 1. Ask questions about how your code/product works 2. Generate release notes instantly 3. Auto update your documentation when your code changes We primarily rely on the codebase since it is never out of date
jaimebuelta 1y ago
Stock images. I’ve already seen trining courses (for compliance reasons) using AI videos. A bit cringey, but I imagine cheaper than shooting real people.
- wredcoll 1y ago
  > but I imagine cheaper than shooting real people How much does that cost these days? Do you still have to fly to remote islands?
plantain 1y ago
+50% productivity for 200$/mo is outstanding value! Most countries have 0-2% productivity growth per year!
- IgorPartola 1y ago
  This is a one time gain. Think of it like instead of doing the work yourself you are just pair programming with a junior developer whom you cannot trust to write secure and bug free code. You can probably optimize your interactions such that this “intern” does work while you do other work. But if it’s work blocks what you are doing, it’s just that now you work differently. I toyed with it and found it to be less frustrating to set up the latest layout for a VueJS project, but having it actually write code was… well I had to manually rewrite large chunks of it after it was done. I am sure it will improve but how long until you can tell it the specs, have it work for a few minutes or hours or days, and come back to an actual finished project? My bet is decades to never.
spogbiper 1y ago
I am working on a project that uses LLM to pull certain pieces of information from semi-structured documents and then categorize/file them under the correct account. it's about 95% accurate and we haven't even begun to fine tune it. i expect it will require human in the loop checks for the foreseeable future, but even with a human approval of each item, its going to save the clerical staff hundreds of hours per year. There are a lot of opportunities in automating/semi-automating processes like this, basically just information extraction and categorization tasks.
- beepbooptheory 1y ago
  How will you know in practice which 5% is wrong?
  - spogbiper 1y ago
    the system presents a summary that a human has to approve, with everything laid out to make that as easy as possible, links to all the sources etc
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  Isn’t that something you can do with non ai tooling to 100% accuracy?
  - spogbiper 1y ago
    in some similar cases yes, and this client has tried to accomplish that for literally decades without success. i don't want to be too detailed for reasons, but basically they cannot standardize the input to the point where anything non AI has been able to parse it very well.
- systemerror 1y ago
  The big issue with LLMs is that they’re usually right — like 90% of the time — but that last 10% is tough to fix. A 10% failure rate might sound small, but at scale, it's significant — especially when it includes false positives. You end up either having to live with some bad results, build something to automatically catch mistakes, or have a person double-check everything if you want to bring that error rate down.
kingkawn 1y ago
#5 is an enormous use case that when well implemented will permanently replace prescribed character arcs It is uniquely susceptible because the gaming market is well acclimated to mediocre writing and one dimensional character development that’s tacked on to a software product, so the improvements of making “thinking” improvisational characters can be immense. Another revenue potential you’ve missed is visual effects, where AI tools allow what were previously labor intensive and expensive projects to be completed in much less time and with less, but not no, human input per frame
- shantara 1y ago
  >#5 is an enormous use case that when well implemented will permanently replace prescribed character arcs I mostly disagree. Every gaming AI character demo I've seen so far is just adds more irrelevant filler dialogue between the player and the game they want to play. It's the same problem that some of the older RPG games had, thinking that 4 paragraphs of text is always better than 1.
  - kingkawn 1y ago
    I agree the implementation isn’t great, but mostly it’s because the devs aren’t well versed yet in setting the parameters for the AI’s personality and how rapidly it gets to the point. That’s true of all chatbot AIs out of the box at the moment it seems, but is fixable with an eye to the artistry of the output
VerminOctopus1 1y ago
Even “only sort of works” is too generous for point #2. A dozen Claude Code agents spamming out code is… something. But it still does not replace a human, at all, even a junior one. It’s something else entirely.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
empath75 1y ago
> Replace junior developers with Claude Code or similar. I don't know why everyone goes to "replacing". Were a bunch of computer programmers replaced when compilers came out that made writing machine code a lot easier? Of course not, they were more productive and accomplished a lot more, which made them more valuable, not less.
- LPisGood 1y ago
  A lot of companies have upper limits on the value add of more programmers.
jsmith99 1y ago
MS Copilot is quite useful for meeting minutes and summaries etc. Still not nearly as useful as good handwritten notes but saves loads of time.
- IgorPartola 1y ago
  Sure useful. But we are talking making money useful, not just nice. Like will it create 20% more revenue? 1% more? Or is it just a nice to have?
mrweasel 1y ago
Part of the issue with all this AI hype is that I can't tell if you're joking or not. Most of those suggestions are horrible, 4 and 5 makes sense.
carlosjobim 1y ago
The most important use for AI is for translation. Now anybody can communicate and serve customers and clients from everywhere in the world, and you can also translate all your customer-facing material into any language in the world. That means you expand from millions to billions of potential customers.
mbb70 1y ago
In healthcare, notes are directly correlated with $$$ for the hospital, because everything that is billed for must be documented with a mix of metrics (O2%, temp, lab results), events (orders, prescriptions, procedures) and notes (consultation notes, imaging interpretations, discharge summaries). Billions get spent annually in administrative overhead focused on squeezing the most money out of these notes as possible. A tremendous expense can be justified to increase note quality (aka revenue, though 'accuracy/efficiency' is the trojan horse used to slip by regulators). GenAI has a ton of potential there. Likewise on the insurance side, which has to wade through these notes and produce a very labor intensive paper trail of their own. Eventually the AIs will just sling em-dashes at each other while we sit by pool.

b8 1y ago

AI Customer Service is very frustrating to work with as a end user.

siliconc0w 1y ago
The problem is that a lot of friction is intentional. Companies want there to be friction to return an item or cancel a subscription. Insurance companies want there to be friction to evaluate policies or appeal denied claims. Companies create legal friction to make competition harder. The friction is the point so AI isn't a solution. If you were to add AI they'd just find a way to create new friction.
Spivak 1y ago
I mean look, if the customer service department is just trying to frustrate you into not contacting them then AI is just a new tool in the belt for that. Sad, but improvement for them is explicitly worse for you. But if you're actually trying to provide good customer service because people are paying you for it any paying per case then you wouldn't dare put a phone menu or AI chat bot in-between them and the human. The person handles all the interaction with the client and then uses AI where it's useful to speed up the actual work.
jmkni 1y ago
Yep. The thing is, you aren't contacting customer services because everything is going well, you are contacting them because you have a problem. The last thing you need is to be gaslit by an AI. The worst ones are the ones where you don't realise right away you aren't talking to a person, you get that initial hope that you've actually gotten through to someone who can help you (and really quickly too) only to have it dawn on you that you are talking to a ChatGPT wrapper who can't help you at all.
timeinput 1y ago
So are call trees where you have to answer yes / no to a decision tree (and can't press 0 / 1, you have to verbalize "yes" or "no"). Those continue to exist, so I expect AI customer 'service' to be very frustrating to work with for quite some time.

wedn3sday 1y ago

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.

OutOfHere 1y ago
In all the companies I have worked at and have looked at such docs, unfortunately this doesn't really work because those internal documentation sites are statistically never up to date or even close. They are hilariously unclearly written or out of date. As for relying on the code base, that is good for code, although not for onboarding/deployment/operations/monitoring/troubleshooting that have manual steps.
- devstein 1y ago
  ^this, but many non-code documents with manual steps can also be kept up-to-date as long as there is a way (a) relate it back to the codebase or another source of truth (b) detect conflicts (when someone says something in contradiction to an existing document) Disclaimer: We are building this at https://dosu.dev https://dosu.dev
arahman4710 1y ago
Check out https://asksolo.ai/ https://asksolo.ai/ We connect with slack/notion/code/etc so that you can do the following: 1. Ask questions about how your code/product works 2. Generate release notes instantly 3. Auto update your documentation when your code changes We primarily rely on the codebase since it is never out of date

jaimebuelta 1y ago

Stock images. I’ve already seen trining courses (for compliance reasons) using AI videos. A bit cringey, but I imagine cheaper than shooting real people.

wredcoll 1y ago
> but I imagine cheaper than shooting real people How much does that cost these days? Do you still have to fly to remote islands?

plantain 1y ago

+50% productivity for 200$/mo is outstanding value! Most countries have 0-2% productivity growth per year!

IgorPartola 1y ago
This is a one time gain. Think of it like instead of doing the work yourself you are just pair programming with a junior developer whom you cannot trust to write secure and bug free code. You can probably optimize your interactions such that this “intern” does work while you do other work. But if it’s work blocks what you are doing, it’s just that now you work differently. I toyed with it and found it to be less frustrating to set up the latest layout for a VueJS project, but having it actually write code was… well I had to manually rewrite large chunks of it after it was done. I am sure it will improve but how long until you can tell it the specs, have it work for a few minutes or hours or days, and come back to an actual finished project? My bet is decades to never.

spogbiper 1y ago

I am working on a project that uses LLM to pull certain pieces of information from semi-structured documents and then categorize/file them under the correct account. it's about 95% accurate and we haven't even begun to fine tune it. i expect it will require human in the loop checks for the foreseeable future, but even with a human approval of each item, its going to save the clerical staff hundreds of hours per year. There are a lot of opportunities in automating/semi-automating processes like this, basically just information extraction and categorization tasks.

beepbooptheory 1y ago
How will you know in practice which 5% is wrong?
- spogbiper 1y ago
  the system presents a summary that a human has to approve, with everything laid out to make that as easy as possible, links to all the sources etc
kjkjadksj 1y ago
Isn’t that something you can do with non ai tooling to 100% accuracy?
- spogbiper 1y ago
  in some similar cases yes, and this client has tried to accomplish that for literally decades without success. i don't want to be too detailed for reasons, but basically they cannot standardize the input to the point where anything non AI has been able to parse it very well.
systemerror 1y ago
The big issue with LLMs is that they’re usually right — like 90% of the time — but that last 10% is tough to fix. A 10% failure rate might sound small, but at scale, it's significant — especially when it includes false positives. You end up either having to live with some bad results, build something to automatically catch mistakes, or have a person double-check everything if you want to bring that error rate down.

kingkawn 1y ago

#5 is an enormous use case that when well implemented will permanently replace prescribed character arcs It is uniquely susceptible because the gaming market is well acclimated to mediocre writing and one dimensional character development that’s tacked on to a software product, so the improvements of making “thinking” improvisational characters can be immense. Another revenue potential you’ve missed is visual effects, where AI tools allow what were previously labor intensive and expensive projects to be completed in much less time and with less, but not no, human input per frame

shantara 1y ago
>#5 is an enormous use case that when well implemented will permanently replace prescribed character arcs I mostly disagree. Every gaming AI character demo I've seen so far is just adds more irrelevant filler dialogue between the player and the game they want to play. It's the same problem that some of the older RPG games had, thinking that 4 paragraphs of text is always better than 1.
- kingkawn 1y ago
  I agree the implementation isn’t great, but mostly it’s because the devs aren’t well versed yet in setting the parameters for the AI’s personality and how rapidly it gets to the point. That’s true of all chatbot AIs out of the box at the moment it seems, but is fixable with an eye to the artistry of the output

VerminOctopus1 1y ago

Even “only sort of works” is too generous for point #2. A dozen Claude Code agents spamming out code is… something. But it still does not replace a human, at all, even a junior one. It’s something else entirely.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

empath75 1y ago

> Replace junior developers with Claude Code or similar. I don't know why everyone goes to "replacing". Were a bunch of computer programmers replaced when compilers came out that made writing machine code a lot easier? Of course not, they were more productive and accomplished a lot more, which made them more valuable, not less.

LPisGood 1y ago
A lot of companies have upper limits on the value add of more programmers.

jsmith99 1y ago

MS Copilot is quite useful for meeting minutes and summaries etc. Still not nearly as useful as good handwritten notes but saves loads of time.

IgorPartola 1y ago
Sure useful. But we are talking making money useful, not just nice. Like will it create 20% more revenue? 1% more? Or is it just a nice to have?

mrweasel 1y ago

Part of the issue with all this AI hype is that I can't tell if you're joking or not. Most of those suggestions are horrible, 4 and 5 makes sense.

carlosjobim 1y ago

The most important use for AI is for translation. Now anybody can communicate and serve customers and clients from everywhere in the world, and you can also translate all your customer-facing material into any language in the world. That means you expand from millions to billions of potential customers.

mbb70 1y ago

In healthcare, notes are directly correlated with $$$ for the hospital, because everything that is billed for must be documented with a mix of metrics (O2%, temp, lab results), events (orders, prescriptions, procedures) and notes (consultation notes, imaging interpretations, discharge summaries). Billions get spent annually in administrative overhead focused on squeezing the most money out of these notes as possible. A tremendous expense can be justified to increase note quality (aka revenue, though 'accuracy/efficiency' is the trojan horse used to slip by regulators). GenAI has a ton of potential there. Likewise on the insurance side, which has to wade through these notes and produce a very labor intensive paper trail of their own. Eventually the AIs will just sling em-dashes at each other while we sit by pool.