6 ms·
McKinsey wonders how to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits
- jordanb 1y agoMaybe they could send them to Harvard Business School?
- bgwalter 1y agoThat is good news for once. If McKinsey is on the case, "AI" will soon fail (after McKinsey has raked in consultancy fees).
- StableAlkyne 1y ago> while quoting an HR executive at a Fortune 100 company griping: "All of these copilots are supposed to make work more efficient with fewer people, but my business leaders are also saying they can't reduce head count yet." I'm surprised McKinsey convinced someone to say the quiet part out loud
- jordanb 1y agoAlso strange that this executive is worried about how the business continues to function after the people are gone. That's not the McKinsey Way!
- _fat_santa 1y agoI find it all quite strange: - AI companies of course will try and sell you that you can reduce headcount with AI - CEO's will parrot this talking point without ever talking a closer look. - Everyone lower down on the org chart minus the engineers are wondering why the change hasn't started yet. - Meanwhile engineers are ripping their hair out cause they know that AI in it's current state will likely not replace any workers. Pretty soon we will have articles like "That time that CEO's thought that AI could replace workers".
- newsclues 1y agoAI is most capable of replacing the humans who have the power to decide or influence the choice to replace humans with AI. But managers will not obsolete themselves. So right now AI should be used to monitor and analyze the workforce and find the efficiency that can be achieved with AI.
- btbuildem 1y agoI am still of the conviction that "reducing employee head count" with AI should start at the top of the org chart. The current iterations of AI already talk like the C-suites, and deliver approximately same value. It would provide additional benefits, in that AIs refuse to do unethical things and generally reason acceptably well. The cost cutting would be immense! I am not kidding. In any large corps, the decision makers refuse to take any risks, show no creativity, move as a flock with other orgs, and stay middle-of-the-road, boring, beige khaki. The current AIs are perfect for this.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y agoOne could argue that they deliver a better value than meat leaders.
- johndhi 1y agoNot a crazy idea. Sergey at Google said it's best at replacing managers fwiw
- apwell23 1y agowhy isn't he doing it then?
- jordanb 1y ago"Wow this AI both writes and reads email? That's about 90 percent of my job and -- I presume -- 90 percent of what happens around here!"
- 1y ago
- iamleppert 1y agoHow does it make sense to trade one group of labor (human) who are generally loosely connected, having little collective power for another (AI)? What you're really doing isn't making work more "efficient", you're just outsourcing work to another party -- one who you have very little control over. A party that is very well capitalized, who is probably interested in taking more and more of your margin once they figure out how your business works (and that's going to be really easy because you help them train AI models to do your business).
- newsclues 1y agoIt’s the same as robots in a factory.
- dr-detroit 1y ago[dead]
- rswail 1y agoExcept that the people that make robots for factories, aren't interested in making whatever that factory is making.
- iamleppert 1y agoThat's not required. All that is required is becoming a sole source of labor, or a source that is the only realistic choice economically. If you ask me, that's the real long game on AI. That is exactly why all these billionaires keep pouring money in. They know it's the only way to continue growth is to start taking over large sections of the economy.
- rswail 1y agoYes, that's the difference between robot makers (tool makers for others) and AI, which is not only trying to be a tool for other companies, but also take over their businesses, by acquiring their knowledge and then use a combination of capture through lack of visibility and (mis-)use of the information gathered to directly compete. Classic enshittification combined with embedding internally to company operations to become indispensable.
- treis 1y agoI think they can. IME LLMs have me working somewhat less and doing somewhat more. It's not a tidal wave but I'm stuck a little bit less on bugs and some things like regex or sql I'm much faster. It's something like 5-10% more productive. That level of slack is easy to take up by doing more but theoretically it means being able to lose 1 out of every 10-20 devs.
- jf22 1y agoThis part was never quiet... The quiet part out loud phrase is overused.
- loudmax 1y agoOrganizations that successfully adapt are those that use new technology to empower their existing workers to become more productive. Organizations looking to replace humans with robots are run by idiots and they will fail.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dahcryn 1y agoboth make a lot of sense, but the biggest mistake they make is to see people as capacity, or as a counter. Each human can be a bit more productive, I fully believe 10-15% is possible with today's tools if we do it right. But each human has it unique set of experience and knowledge. If I do my job a bit faster, and you do your job a bit faster. But if we are a team of 10, and we do all our job 10% faster, doesn't mean you can let one of us go. It just means, we all do our job 10% faster, which we probably waste by drinking more coffee or taking longer lunch breaks
- givemeethekeys 1y ago> Software vendors keen to monetize AI should tread cautiously, since they risk inflating costs for their customers without delivering any promised benefits such as reducing employee head count. That's easy. Reduce the headcount first, and then let the remaining team of poor and desperate, I mean, elite engineers and support teams <buzzword for use> AI for <more buzzwords for make dollars go up> /s. When will boards replace executive leadership with AI? If Return to Office taught us anything, it was that we already need a couple, and the rest of them copy and paste. Well, AI can do that! Also /s, but maybe just 50%.
- JCM9 1y agoWhat most companies and CEOs fail to grasp is that with all the talk of headcount cuts from AI customers are expecting that AI will LOWER pricing and costs, not raise it. Challenge is that the cost cutting story is mostly vaporware (as many other studies have shown) so CEOs are in a tough spot. They can’t both boast to shareholders at how much cost savings they got from rolling out AI and then charge customers more. All this is pretty textbook setup for how this bubble finally implodes as companies fail to deliver on their AI investments and come under fire from shareholders for spending a ton with little return to show for it.
- gorbachev 1y agoI can't wait until the AI vendors start charging according to the true costs of their tools (+ profit margin). Let's see what the cost savings are then. Additionally once the AI vendors have locked these companies to their ecosystem, the enshittification will start and the companies who reduced their headcount to bare minimum will start to see why that was a really, really bad idea.
- Printerisreal 1y agoTruth is out people. They are confessing it now.
- rchaud 1y agoThey're trying to get out in front of a market crash that everyone knows is coming, after shoving it down every CEO's throat for half a decade.
- mojuba 1y agoAI in its present form is probably the strangest and the most paradoxical tech ever invented. These things are clearly useful once you know where they excel and where they will likely complicate things for you. And even then, there's a lot of trial and error involved and that's due to the non-deterministic nature of these systems. On the one hand it's impressive that I can spawn a task in Claude's app "what are my options for a flight from X to Y [+ a bunch of additional requirements]" while doing groceries, then receive a pretty good answer. Isn't it magic? (if you forget about the necessity of adding "keep it short" all the time). Pretty much a personal assistant without the ability of performing actions on my behalf, like booking tickets - a bit too early for that. Then there's coding. My Copilot has helped me dive into a gigantic pre-existing project in an unfamiliar programming language pretty fast and yet I have to correct and babysit it all the time by intuition. Did it save me time? Probably, but I'm not 100% sure! The paradoxicality is in that there's probably no going back from AI where it already kind of works for us individually or at org levels, but most of us don't seem to be fully satisfied with it. The article here pretty much confirms the paradox of AI: yes, orgs implement it, can't go back from it and yet can't reduce the headcount either. My prediction at the moment is that AI is indeed a bubble but we will probably go through a series of micro-bursts instead of one gigantic burst. AI is here to stay almost like a drug that we will be willing to pay for without seeing clear quantifiable benefits.
- deepsquirrelnet 1y agoIt’s a result of the lack of rigor in how it’s being used. Machine learning has been useful for years despite less than 100% accuracy, and the way you trust it is through measurement. Most people using or developing with AI today have punted on that because it’s hard or time consuming. Even people who hold titles of machine learning engineer seem to have forgotten. We will eventually reach a point where people are teaching each other how to perform evaluation. And then we’ll probably realize that it was being avoided because it’s expense to even get to the point where you can take a measurement and perhaps you didn’t want to know the answer.
- johndhi 1y agoI feel like one benefit of humans is you can find someone you can truly trust under almost all circumstances and delegate to them. With AI you have a thing you can't quite trust under any circumstance even if it's pretty good at everything.
- richardw 1y agoFirst AI came for the artists And I did not speak out Because I was not an artist
- bluefirebrand 1y agoSpeak for yourself. I've been shouting against AI from minute 1, in defense of artists and anyone else It doesn't matter. People are convinced it's a miracle technology, so I'm just a backwards luddite resisting progress
- mrbadguy 1y agoKeep at it, friend. You are not alone.
- bluefirebrand 1y agoThanks, I really appreciate it
- richardw 1y agoIt derives from a poem: First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist Then they came for the trade unionists And I did not speak out Because I was not a trade unionist Then they came for the Jews And I did not speak out Because I was not a Jew Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me
- jncfhnb 1y agoKind of the opposite of the article’s sentiment
- raxxorraxor 1y agoDevelopers are hit too, although I don't expect that anyone will be replaced. I think AI is a productivity boost, it just takes less times to solve the small problems and get reasonable advice for aynthing beyond. Perhaps it reduced required headcount to implement some features. But companies that expel their knowledge workers for some AI solution probably won't survive long. Those that understand the tooling advantage, will get ahead though. I love AI image generation, but many certainly do not enjoy the results. I can see some people skimping on paying artists. First I thought translators would be hit hard by AI, but you probably still need them as well to be decently sure about correctness. And it remains true that any creativity produced by AI is basically still just a function of the creativity of other people.
- oytis 1y agoNext they should start wondering why to sell AI apps with no measurable benefits
- joelthelion 1y agoThat one is easy to answer from their perspective :)
- jncfhnb 1y agoBecause you want to sell what people want to buy
- jmuguy 1y agoI hadn't ever tried Notion before but I sort of vaguely understood it was a nice way to make some documentation and wiki type content. I had a need for something like a table that I could filter that I would normally just do in Google Sheets. So I go check out Notion and their entire site is focused on AI. Look at what this agent can do, or that. I signed up and the entire signup flow is also focused on AI. Finally I was able to locate what I thought was their core offering - the wikis etc. And ended up pretty impressed with the features they have for all of that. Now maybe Notion customers love all these AI features but it was super weird to see that stuff so prominently given my understanding of what the company was all about.
- inquirerGeneral 1y agoJust read a single interview by the CEO etc, they are all in on AI
- geerlingguy 1y agoThey used to be like a really easy to use collaborative wiki. And I used it for a couple distributed projects and loved that aspect. But I'm guessing their growth was linear, and hard fought, after initial success over tools like Atlassian's which are annoying and expensive. So to get back to hypergrowth, they had to stuff AI in every nook and cranny.
- pydry 1y agothe sad part is that it wasnt entirely nonsensical to use AI to improve notion's use as a knowledge base but the way they actually used it was in the most hamfisted ways possible.
- wintermutestwin 1y agoNotion customer here and their AI crap keeps interrupting my workflow. Pretty stupid move on their part because they have motivated me to ditch the subscription.
- mountainriver 1y agoYou kind of have to be or a competitor will come out being AI first and may get a bunch of funding
- richardw 1y agoSuggest posting the original: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/upgrading-software-business-models-to-thrive-in-the-ai-era https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-tel...
- hansmayer 1y agoDid the report from Deloitte come in yet ? :)
- Gigachad 1y agoIt’s been refunded for being AI slop.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoIt has to be tough for them. They can't not be in on the grift, it's too big and they're too big. But the grift doesn't really benefit them.
- walkabout 1y agoThey're probably salty that the only jobs of theirs they can figure out how to automate away with AI are the too-cheap-to-bother-automating Indian workers who author their PowerPoint decks.
- jncfhnb 1y agothe people in India don’t author the slides. They just make them look nice. We have some AI for it.
- rchaud 1y agoIf there was a nuclear apocalypse, McKinsey would still be there offering advice on how to grow crops on irradiated soil.
- fuzzfactor 1y ago>Consultant says software vendors risk hiking prices without cutting costs or boosting productivity From what I know of the firm, it looks like clients have come to the right place if they want a consultant with great experience at hiking prices without cutting costs or boosting productivity.
- croes 1y agoQuite ironic that that comes from McKinsey because their service also rarely has a measurable benefit
- walkabout 1y agoOur ability to measure management productivity in general is basically nonexistent. It's an area of academic study and AFAIK the state-of-the-art remains not much better than [shrug emoji]. Remember that when they're wrecking your productivity by trying to twist your job into something they can measure in a spreadsheet.
- rubzah 1y agoDot-bomb 2.0.
- jstummbillig 1y ago> Many software firms trumpet potential use cases for AI, but only 30 percent have published quantifiable return on investment from real customer deployments. "Only" 30%. Interesting framing.
- walkabout 1y agoThis kind of "data driven" corporate stuff is, IME, so bullshitty and hand-wavy that I'd assume if only 30% are able to claim to have found quantifiable ROI (most of them with laughably bad methodology a slightly-clever 10th grader who half paid attention in their science and/or stats classes could spot) it means that only 5% or fewer actually found ROI.
- rsynnott 1y agoThis means that only 30% are even _claiming_ to have shown anything quantifiable. Given that such claims tend to be essentially puffery, the _real_ rate is presumably far lower.
- ath3nd 1y ago[dead]
- alberth 1y agoMcKinsey has pitched my company on projects where their compensation is entirely outcome-based — for example, if a project generates $20 million in incremental revenue, they would earn 10% of that amount. I have to admit, the results they demonstrated — which we validated using our own data — were impressive. The challenge, however, is that outcome-based contracts are hard for companies to manage, since they still need to plan and budget for potential costs upfront. So even when you have measurable benefits - it's still not so easy either. EDIT: To clarify the issue — companies are used to budgeting for initiatives with fixed costs. But in an outcome-based contract, the cost is variable. As a result, finance teams struggle to plan or allocate budgets because the final amount could range widely — for example, $200K, $2M, or even $20M — depending on the results achieved. Additionally, you almost then need a partial FTE just to manage these contracts to ensure you don't overpay because the results are wrongly measured, etc. None of these challenges are insurmountable, but it's also not easy for companies either.
- caminante 1y agoWhat's upfront about a backloaded earnout? You model it as a fixed %, variable cost and run revenue sensitivities. It either meets your investment criteria or doesn't.
- mschild 1y agoI'd imagine the opportunity cost and man power. Even though McKinsey should do the work they will need access to people and information to accomplish it.
- caminante 1y agoParent said McK's fee is 100% contingent. If the company doesn't have the resources available to execute something they've validated, then that's a funding issue that can be solved. Either way, McK's structure doesn't make it "hard for a company to manage." The investment committee approves or rejects.
- flumpcakes 1y ago
- rybosworld 1y agoLooking at this from a software dev perspective: - The moment AI is actually good enough to replace us, it will also be incredibly easy to create new software/apps/whatever. There could/would be a billion solo dev SAAS companies eating the lunch of every traditional tech org. - People (Executives) seem to underestimate just how much of the work is iterating and refining a product over a long time. Getting an LLM good enough to complete a Jira task is missing the point. - IMO LLM's are also completely draining the motivation of workers. A lot of software devs are intrinsically motivated by solving the problem. If your role is being watered down to "prompt the chat bot and baby sit what comes out", the motivation disappears. This also absolutely destroys any of the creativity/discovery that comes out of solving the task hands-on.
- resolutefunctor 1y agoYour perspective on your last point is interesting. I actually feel the opposite, its become a motivator for me. I used to love coding, and did it a ton. Then it became less and less part of my job, and I started hating coding. It was so frustrating when I knew exactly what needed to be done in the code, but had to spend the time doing low value stuff like typing syntax, tracing through the code to find the right file to edit, etc when I'm already strapped for time. LLMs and agentic coding tools have allowed me to not spend time on the low-value tasks of typing, but instead on the high-value tasks of solving problems like you mentioned. Just interesting the different perspectives we have.
- rybosworld 1y agoThat's a fair point and I actually agree with you. A large part of writing code is doing something menial as you said. I think both of the viewpoints are valid depending on where you're at in your career. We can imagine a junior developer who isn't quite bored with those low-value tasks just yet. As you grow more senior/experienced, the novel problems become harder to find - and those are the one's you want to work on. AI can certainly help you cut through the chaff so you have more time to focus on those. But trends are trends and AI is increasingly getting better at solving the novel/interesting problems that I think you're referring to. Everyone's different and I know there are folks who are excited to not have to write a single line of code. I'd wager that's not actually most engineers/developers though. People still garden by hand because it's innately satisfying.
- QuantumNoodle 1y agoWe have to accept that sometimes technology that was envisioned to change the future one way, may be beneficial in other ways instead - and that's okay. We are very clearly still in the phase of "throw AI at everything and see where it is useful." For example, just yesterday I was sent a contract to sign via DigiSign. There was a "Summarize contract with AI" button. Having read the contract in full, I was curious how good the summary would be. The summary was very low fidelity and did not go into the weeds of the contract and I would be essentially signing the contract blind. Although AI is pretty good at summarizing key point of things like articles and conversations, this was a very poor use case imho. But hey, they tried it and hopefully see it is a waste. Nothing wrong with iterating we just have to converge on acceptable use cases.
- cozzyd 1y agoI wonder if the AI summary could be legally perilous in this case
- HelloMcFly 1y agoEasy to imagine that many organizations using it don't necessarily want the signees to really read the document in full anyway, much less get an informative summary with Reasons To Be Cautious of Signing as one of the summary categories.
- rsynnott 1y agoI assume it had the usual "this is AI, and thus probably bullshit" disclaimers that one finds on such things.
- cozzyd 1y agoPLEASE DON'T USE ME FOR ANYTHING IMPORTANT BUT I PROMISE I'M STILL USEFUL
- xp84 1y agoNow you’ve got me wondering which is worse: signing with the briefest 15-second skim, or signing based on a cheap AI summary. Setting aside tinfoil hat ideas (Prompt: “Downplay any possible causes for concern…”) I’m not actually sure the AI option is worse. I mean, I’ll fully admit I don’t read everything I sign. When you buy a house it’s like 1,000 pages of stuff. Apple or Google’s mandatory TOS is what, 100 pages single-spaced? What I’d be more interested in is an AI paralegal that works for me, not for the signing tool or the counterparty, where I control its prompt so I can try to focus it on possible ways I can be screwed with this contract, and what recourses I will or won’t have.
- luciferin 1y agoI am curious if the timing have impacted the inability to measure a benefit. AI is rolling out at the same time as widespread return to office campaigns. Remote work was widely studied and touted as improving efficiency, but no one is showing the drop for RTO. Is AI in part just balancing it out? There's also an ongoing massive brain drain. Many companies are either laying off their most tenured and competent employees, or they are making life miserable for them in the hopes that they quit. All of this said, using AI in your back end takes a huge amount of time from your users and employees. You have to vary multiple prompts, you have to make the output sane, touch it up, etc. The most useful part of AI for me has been using it to learn something new, or push through a task that I otherwise couldn't do. I was able to partially rewrite a logging window to reduce CPU use significantly. It took me over two weeks of back and forth with AI to figure out a workable solution and implement it into the software. I competent programmer probably could have done it better than I did in less than an hour. There's no business benefit to a help desk person being able to spend 2 weeks writing code that an engineer would be much better suited to handling. But maybe that engineer could write it in 10 minutes instead of an hour if they used AI to understand the software first.
- SecretDreams 1y ago> Is AI in part just balancing it out? Likely, no. In my industry, I see a fraction of ICs using it well, a fraction of leadership using it for absolute dog shit idea generation, and the remainder using it to make their jobs easier in the short run, while incurring debt in the long run since nobody is "learning" from AI summaries and most people don't seem to be reading the generated "AI notes" sent in emails. By and large, I think AI is going to hurt my workplace based on the current trajectory, but it won't be realized until we are in a hard hole to dig out of.
- heymynameisrob 1y agoProblem is with RTO is companies aren't getting the benefit of using AI to manage all their internal knowledge. Bringing people back into the office defeats the purpose of having this central "worker" who can answer queries, point people in the right direction etc. People will just fallback on shouting across the office and scheduling pointless meetings. Really companies failed to make remote work because it meant giving up a lot of middle-management power and some people realising their job means very little.
- daft_pink 1y agoI definitely find some of the features AI is going into like my PDF reader are useless and troubling
- harvey9 1y agoAdobe Reader on my work pc doesn't even do ctrl-f very well.
- xp84 1y agoWhile most Mac features I loved 15 years ago are pretty well enshittified now, the Preview app is something I wish Microsoft would fully clone. Edge serves as a halfway-decent viewer, but there isn’t a good reason for Windows not to have something like Preview.
- btbuildem 1y agoThis is because they're trying to reduce the wrong headcount. The largest inefficiencies in corpo orgs lie in the ways they organize their knowledge and information stores, and in how they manage decision making. The rank and file generally have a really good grasp on their subset of the domain -- they have expertise and experience, as well as local context. Small teams, their managers -- those are the ones who actually perform, and deliver value. As you move up the hierarchy, access to information does not scale. People in the middle are generally mediocre performers, buried in process, ritual and politic. In addition to these burdens, the information systems do their best to obscure knowledge, with the usual excuses of Safe and Secure (tm) -- things are siloed, search does not work, archives are sunsetted, etc. In some orgs tribalism also plays an outsized role, with teams acting competitive, which largely results in wasted resources and seven versions of the same failed attempt at New Shiny Thing. Then as we look higher yet in the hierarchy, the so-called decision makers don't really do anything that cannot be described as "maximize profit" or "cut costs", all while fighting not to get pulled down by the Lord of the Flies shenanigans of their underlings. They are the most replaceable. A successful "AI Transformation" would come in top-down, going after the most expensive headcount first. Only truly valuable contributors would remain at that level. Organizational knowledge bases would allow to search, analyze and reason about the institutional knowledge accrued in corporate archives over the years, enabling much more effective decision making. Meanwhile, the ICs would benefit from the AI boost, outsourcing some menial tasks to the machine, with the dual benefit of levelling up their roles, and feeding the machine more context about the lower-level work done across the org.
- lenerdenator 1y ago> This is because they're trying to reduce the wrong headcount. > A successful "AI Transformation" would come in top-down, going after the most expensive headcount first. This isn't a mistake. McKinsey consultants and their executives at their clients are a part of the same clique. You don't get into either without going to the right schools, being in the right fraternities, and knowing the right people. "Maximize profit" and "cut costs" are to be read as "keep the most money for ourselves in the form of earnings per share and dividends" and "pay fewer people". And since you can convert shares to money by gutting companies, there's no real incentive to remain competitive in the greater marketplace.
- npilk 1y ago> For every $1 spent on model development, firms should expect to have to spend $3 on change management, which means user training and performance monitoring I think the general point here is true, but it's also brilliant framing from a company selling consulting services.
- caminante 1y agoIt couldn't get sillier. Oh wait! > Price levels: How should vendors set price levels when the cost of inferencing is dropping rapidly? How should they balance value capture with scaling adoption? This is written for B2B target clients as if it's pulling back the veil on pricing strategy and negotiating. Hire McKinsey to get you the BEST™ deal in town.
- _fizz_buzz_ 1y agoI recently talked to someone who works at a company that builds fairly complicated machinery (induction heating for a certain material processing). He works in management and they did a week long workshop with a bunch of the managers to figure out where AI will make their company more efficient. What they came up with was that they could feed a spec from a customer into an AI and the AI will create the CAD drawings, wiring diagrams, software etc. by itself. And they wrote a report on it. And I just had to break it to him: The thing that AI is actually best at, is replacing these week-long workshop where managers are bs-ing around to write reports. Also, it shouldn't be the managers doing a top down approach where to deploy AI. Get the engineers, technicians, programmers etc. and they should have a workshop to make plans where to use AI, because they probably already are experimenting with it and understand where it works well and where it doesn't quite cut it yet.
- afavour 1y agoOccurs to me that AI is a fundamental threat to the likes of McKinsey. You bring in the consultants when you want to make a decision but don't want any of the responsibility for making it. In the future they'll just give that task to an anonymous AI. "Nothing we can do!"
- silexia 1y agoDid McKinsey write this with AI?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- capestart 1y ago[dead]
- rsynnott 1y ago> Software vendors keen to monetize AI should tread cautiously, since they risk inflating costs for their customers without delivering any promised benefits such as reducing employee head count. ... Wait, why would the _vendor_ care about that? It's the customers who should be cautious; unscrupulous vendors will absolutely sell them useless snake oil with no qualms, if they're willing to buy it. > These leaders are increasingly making budget trade-offs between head count investment and AI deployment, and expect vendors to engage them on value and outcomes, not just features. The cheek of them! Actually demanding that the product be useful!
- rchaud 1y agoMcKinsey 2 years ago: > The firm’s earlier research suggested that 2027 would be the first year when AI technology would be able to match the typical human’s performance in tasks that involve “natural-language understanding.” Now, McKinsey reckons it will happen this year." > "Generative AI will give humans a new “superpower”, and the economy a much-needed productivity injection, said Lareina Yee, a senior partner at the firm and chair of McKinsey Technology, in the report. - https://archive.is/mhYIn https://archive.is/mhYIn
- thisisit 1y agoAt my company people always understate the headcount savings. Because the invariable question is - "You are spending x million and for y FTEs you save only 1 FTE of HC? How does that make sense?". Or worse yet - "You estimated 40 FTE savings, why don't we pick and chose 40 FTEs to let go". That sends shivers down managers as it reduces their area of influence. They found a hack and that is loading up the intangible column. In that list reputation/brand risk always makes an appearance. "If you don't do this project this terrible thing might happen and we might suffer reputational risk. We estimate 2x millions of loss due to reputation being harmed". And presto! there is a case for the project. Its like cloud migration project. Total run costs are part of the pitch but you add on extra things like added security, automatic updates etc. it becomes an easier sell. AI tools being so hyper focused on "productivity gains" it is going to be tough sell. Especially because users will resist it and the productivity boosts if any will remain low.
- fellowniusmonk 1y agoI was a IC consultant for a big 4 group at one point. Very successful in my domain on a very successful project. I wrote an insane amount of code but more importantly I wrote libraries across multiple languages that prevented an insane amount of code from being written. We would have literally 1k people during quarterly planning and did distributed agile and all this org stuff (It was interesting anthropologically to me because I operated outside the game, I was just waiting for a ~non-compete I had signed for a profitable technical co-founder exit to end to jump back into starting a new company in the same space.) And the whole thing worked, and I was very high profile on the project as probably the highest paid IC and the company hired me away from the agency and I worked their until starting my company. There are 3 layers, the deal makers, the coordinators and the implementers. You cannot easily automate out the deal makers because they are trust, legal/contracting and power (they use the resources of the firm to allocate: people, resources, etc.) loci. Someone has to hang if stuff goes wrong and someone has to deal with executive petulance and fragile egos. Now lets look at the middle layer and implementers. Let's assume for a minute we are looking at a big project where the existing company has hamstrung itself with silos and infighting and low productivity teams, this is just framing to understand the next part, it can cut either way. The middle layer in consulting is big because other companies have big middle layers as well, and basically what is happening is tribal warfare, you need bodies and voices and change management teams to propagate what is happening otherwise the existing group will slow play the leadership and the project never gets done. If the middle layer is 1 to 1 every native sees they can be replaced. Many big 4 allow poaching for this very reason. The threat of non compliance and then also giving an easy congenial out for people who are ready to exit the consultant lifestyle. The implementation layer is then able to be done, and it's done by juniors mostly because juniors don't have to be politically savvy, they can work to task. Just a small slice or things I realized while consulting.
- insane_dreamer 1y agoI have yet to use an application, other than IDE's or code editors like Zed, that have AI features that I actually use and which provide some benefit. Every Google app has it and it literally stinks -- it offers to do a bunch of stuff I don't want or need, and doesn't properly perform any of the tasks that I could actually use help with. Same with Figma, Acrobat, Office365, QuickBooks, Slack, Confluence, Jira, etc. etc. And don't even get me started with the "AI Assistants" that every support company has which are utterly useless and just make it more difficult to get to an actual human. The only use cases I've actually seen in production that are high performance are: 1) writing code (CC is good), 2) code inline editing suggestions (Zed does this pretty well, so does JetBrains), 3) document summaries.
- raxxorraxor 1y agoSame. I use AI to code, but it often is just scaffolding (I often have projects with limited scope, but a lot of them). It is a real help. Also it shuffles things up, uses solutions I didn't have the time to learn or look up. So it provides some education as well. I still have to check everything, but i basically replaced project scaffoliding tools to a large part. I also use image generation extensively, but that is for hobby purposes. I trained some models (RAG) and build some tools, but quickly noticed that is quiet a bit of work even to generate and audit the knowledge base you want to consume. I think it warrants to be a new job position. Problem is that this position needs someone who is very familiar with the processes within a company, so external help here is hard to come by and it would be a longer time investment. If you have success here, I would assume it could boost productivity for workers that aren't that close to AI tech and maybe just used AI for search and questions. Until now we (only?) have an AI that reads mails and imports the relevant information into our ERP, CRM or general content systems. It queries relevant information about support cases to provide helpful context for case handlers. I think it works quite well, but I cannot imagine it replacing anyone. Exception might be if you specialize on scamming people, that could probably work.