alt Hacker NewsThe biggest impact of AI at my job are LLM code generators for software engineers. That's only scratching the surface of what AI can do for enterprises. My company doesn't yet have the orientation, inclination or technical expertise to unlock the true power of AI for our business goals. We're stuck buying packaged solutions from third parties and aren't integrating layers of intelligence in our environment.
I doubt we're unique. Chat bots are useful. But it will take years, possibly decades for work to transform to due to AI. Probably longer for everyday life. The diffusion of new technology, even something as profound as AI, has to fight the friction and realities of the real world. Always has.
Plenty of companies didn't have any online presence until 10+ years after the dotcom boom, and they were fine. An HVAC service working on existing contracts? No website no problem.
But AI is becoming much more pervasive than websites. And the level of friction isn't as high as you might think, because people are already constantly on phones. It's only a matter of time before MS Copilot gets so good that even the least tech-savvy people start asking AI to do their work. That same HVAC service owner can tell AI "there's a big emergency at Bob's Burgers in Brentwood, get 2 of my guys there ASAP. We can reschedule a visit if needed".
These are not trillion token operations either. It will be affordable to do this. And generic office commands like "schedule this", "contact X about Y" are 3-5 years away from being super usable. And that's mainly because there's a lot of gruntwork for enabling agents to access the right data.