[michaelfm1211]

> The data also reveals a misalignment in resource allocation. More than half of generative AI budgets are devoted to sales and marketing tools, yet MIT found the biggest ROI in back-office automation—eliminating business process outsourcing, cutting external agency costs, and streamlining operations.

Makes sense. The people in charge of setting AI initiatives and policies are office people and managers who could be easily replaced by AI, but the people in charge not going to let themselves be replaced. Salesmen and engineers are the hardest to replace, yet they aren't in charge so they get replaced the fastest.

[zoeysmithe]

I think this is being overly complimenting to AI. I think the most obvious reason is that for almost all business use cases its not very helpful. All these initiatives have the same problem. Staff asking 'how can this actually help me,' because they can't get it to help them other than polishing emails, polishing code, and writing summaries which is not what most people's jobs are. Then you have to proofread all of this because AI makes a lot of mistakes and poor assumptions, on top of hallucinations.

I dont think Joe and Jane worker are purposely not using to protect their jobs, everyone wants ease at work, its just these LLM-based AI's dont offer much outside of some use cases. AI is vastly over-hyped and now we're in the part of the hype cycle where people are more comfortable saying to power, "This thing you love and think will raise your stock price is actually pretty terrible for almost all the things you said it would help with."

AI has its place, but its not some kind of universal mind that will change everything and be applicable in significant and fundamentally changing ways outside of some narrow use cases.

I'm on week 3 of making a video game (something I've never done before) with Claude/Chat and once I got past the 'tutorial level' design, these tools really struggle. I think even where an LLM would naturally be successful (structured logical languages), its still very underwhelming. I think we're just seeing people push back on hype and feeling empowered to say "This weird text autogenerator isn't helping me."

[danjl]

3D apps are particularly bad for AI. The LLMs are fantastic at web apps that produce an HTML DOM. But they suck at generating code for a 3D app that needs rendering, game logic, physics and similar stuff. All of that is much more complicated than a DOM. Plus, there is 100x the amount of training data for web apps. It is similarly harder to test 3D apps. Testing web code is glorious. You can access the UI via the DOM, execute events, and then check the DOM for success. None of that is possible in 3D, where there is just an image and a mouse, and no way to find and push a button or check the results. A few of the LLM IDEs allow you to add images, which could really help cross this gap, but most do not, and those that do are not designed to be able to detect rendering artifacts, or detect if a given object is in the right place.

[HankStallone]

Part of it is that the bosses often don't know what they want, so they leave the details up to marketing or whoever, so replacing marketing or whoever with AI would mean figuring out what they want. The boss can tell marketing, "Make a brochure for new product ABC," and marketing can run with that and present him with a mock-up, he can make a couple revisions, they shine it up based on those, and then they're done. To replace them completely with AI, he would have to provide a lot more guidance and it would take more iterations to get a correct result that he likes. It wouldn't be completely unlike the current process, but it would demand more of him, which wouldn't make him happy.

Last week I was talking to my boss about a project I've been working on for him, and he asked whether AI could help me with it to save time. I pointed out that a lot of the holdup in the project has been his not knowing exactly what he wants (because he's not sure what the software we're working with can do until I do it and show it to him), and an AI can't tell him what he wants any more than I can. Sometimes you just have to do the work, and technology can't help you.

[thisisit]

There is a reason why sales and marketing is first. It has to do with hallucination.

People have figured out that even if you mess up sales/support/marketing, worse case you apologize and give a gift coupon. And then there is also the verbose nature of LLMs which makes it better suited to write marketing copies etc.

On business process outsourcing like customer support lot of companies are using LLMs, so that part is unclear to me.

Other BPO processes are accounting & finance, IT, human resources etc. And while companies can take that hallucination risk for customers, they see it as a serious risk. If for example, the accounting and finance operations get messed up due to AI hallucination companies will be in real hot water. Same goes for other back office functions like HR, compliance etc. So, most likely this statement is just hogwash.

[pas]

companies that use LLM for support already were pretty deep in the woods with some outsourced unfortunate agent behind the curtains, so they replaced one not very good solution with an even worse, but cheaper one.

and since the whole world was (is) doing it at the same time customers doesn't really had a choice. (but of course having real support is still a differentiator in the market.)

[YetAnotherNick]

> MIT found the biggest ROI in back-office automation

Can't find any source to this, even after searching in Google. To me who knows bit of this, I don't find it very believable. Compared to humans, AI struggles in places where a fixed structure and process is required.