No signs of AI payoff outside the tech sector

I've been doing workflow automations for many organizations for the last two years, and here is what I see:

1. every business unit and department was neglecting a best practice due to lack of investment in their organization. it has always been that way for decades and always will be that way because it isn't economically viable for it to be any other way. the workflow automations and agents we create act as digital workers that either do that neglected part, or let the rest of the organization do that neglected part.

2. the whole company always starts the year off with a bunch of goals, and by Q3 most of them are cancelled. now less of them are cancelled.

both factors mean that anyone just looking at "worker productivity" or "did we save money" is going to get the answer of no. everything is costing you the same, or the AI itself is costing you more. whatever contract I'm working under is definitely going to cost you more, if you don't cancel all those enterprise SaaS seats we told you to cancel.

I see a path to savings, but I don't think that's necessarily the metric to focus on. you need to look at the whole corporate structure, why are you still doing certain things, because those pressures will just make the org do more things because nobody is empowered to say "wait, maybe this is dumb"

lol, you are, sooooooo, blind, and iditic. Enjoy each day, then we, you are dead, vaporised, or some life shit. What a load of bollocks. Full of shit. POinltess drivel.

What about the flood of LLM generated books on Amazon? Maybe sales of slop aren't being systematically tagged as such?

Funny to see some people compare the AI rollout to the industrial revolution.

The industrial revolution produced physical goods at scale, which eventually gave regular people access to things they could not have before.

AI produces intellectual labor at scale. Regular people do not need mass-produced content in their lives: there's already too much music, too much TV, too much software that only seems to get worse year after year.

Who needs mass-produced intellectual labor? The owning class. This is the only population segment that stands to benefit from this revolution. It's the reason every tech CEO is trying to shove AI down everyone's throats. It's the reason they're resting their feet on the table while everyone below them is starting to panic about the future of their careers.

I don't believe we will see compounding acceleration of anything other than spam and enshittification in this AI-laden world. This is not technology for building futures we can barely dream of: it's a gold-plated gift to the oligarchy and a fuck-you to everyone else.

great. let's pop this bubble so everyone panicking can leave us devs alone with our tools. GLM 5.3 is good enough if anthropic and openai go under (which they wont).

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Yeah because vibe coding has only really worked for 3 months. Give it a chance!

It'll probably be a couple of years before most companies even realise it's an option.

I think we are struggling to achieve payoff within the tech sector.

There have been wins with the customer facing side of the business, but the development team seems to be the biggest problem right now despite the direct & obvious applicability of these tools. I know they aren't a special unicorn edge case because I was very rapidly solving their issues before they stopped handing me things that revealed the lethargy.

Within the sector where these tools definitely work, the biggest barrier to effective adoption is figuring out a way to undermine the various ideological high grounds. I have found the most effective argument to untangle this knot to be something approximating:

Challenge:

"Why should I adopt or help to implement technology that might eventually replace my job?"

Response:

"Because refusing to won't protect your job. It puts everyone's job at risk."

It doesn't matter if you protect your job (not using AI) if the entire company goes to the bottom of the ocean as a consequence. The neat thing about this is that your job is part of the set known as "The Company" and if that ceases to exist, so does your job. Good luck suing a dissolved entity for unemployment or whatever. There is enough competition in most markets to punish anyone who thinks they can win on virtue alone.

Trickle-down AI economics here we go! Suuurely it will work this time, any minute now don't worry about it.

We're a little early to be calling the game yet.

The incredible improvements have only been over the last 9 months or so. Business, especially disrupting entire job functions, takes much longer than that. As is typical with this type of change, it'll be slow until a tipping point, then FOMO will hit.