[geoduck14]

>Every single project meeting I've sat in started with an non-technical exec asking, "what can we use AI for?"

To be fair, if the goal is to learn and discover how a new tool works and when to use it, then a legitimate strategy is to solve a bunch of problems with this new tool

[bluefirebrand]

Realistically that isn't the goal of almost any company these days

The goal is just "make all the money at all costs"

[burnte]

I totally agree but AI is such a broad category it's like asking "what can we do with electricity?" Well, that depends, what problems are you looking to solve?

You always start with the problem that needs to be solved, not the solution. I'm concerned we'll have another bubble pop like the dotcom crash. A lot of companies are spending money like mad to have any kind of AI thing they can market about without regard to "Does it work right? Does is solve a problem?"

It took my former company a year and half a million dollars to learn that what we actually needed was a completely different tool that promised to do a lot less, but did what we needed it to do quite well. Mgmt got stars in their eyes with all the things the first tool might be able to do someday, and didn't pay attention to what it could do today.

We switched to the other tool at $70/month/user and saw a retention rate over 90% at 6 months. Exact same test group, exact same type of tool, but this tool was more focused and tangible. We went from spending $450k per year at with the first company to $59k/yr with the second company.

AI isn't magic, You can't skip all the project planning steps you'd normally do just because this is AI. Don't fast track it, don't ignore testing data or feedback, etc. It's hard to push back on excitement but it's important that we do. When our emotions carry us away that's when we make worse decisions.

[Tarsul]

Umm, was your management really willing to spend ~500USD/month/dev (if you hadnt intervened)?? Thats insane. Most companies spend way less (I hope) for AI (even regular IT companies, like where I work). Though I do believe big tech is the craziest, burning all that money for data centers and making it look like sustainable investments on their balance sheets (which they are not).

[ffsm8]

Eh, you can go through $500 in one day of coding if you're using anthropic Claude API and don't pay attention. (Not sub)

But aside from that, were did you get that number? I didn't see any direct reference nor anything that would let you break it down to $/dev