[Avicebron]

It seems like the article's unspoken consensus is if they hired people (ideally local) and paid them a living wage it would go back to working well enough like it did before they attempted the bot.

I wonder why no one brought that up as a solution?

[toomuchtodo]

AI driven individual incentives for decision makers. Comp goes up for showing off AI, not hiring people.

Lots of “thought leaders” who push the solution but will be gone for the consequences. Next folks (usually those who remain) clean up the mess to no fanfare.

[gruez]

>Comp goes up for showing off AI, not hiring people.

That's funny because a few years ago it was the reverse. people were saying how big tech was bloated, caused by managers that felt their clout was proportional to how many people were under them.

[toomuchtodo]

You get what you measure. Both can be wildly irrational depending on incentives and target outcomes.

Would an AI solution have been in place in this context if testing revealed this outcome we’ve arrived at and a data driven decision was made to hire instead? Or was no testing done and we’re testing in prod? Sure looks like testing in prod or simply ignoring metrics specific to a quality customer experience. Like investigating a crash site, we have to ask what series of events and decisions have led us to this incident.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_whys

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root-cause_analysis

[inigyou]

Yes, then the irrational incentives changed to different irrational incentives.

[AussieWog93]

I am wary of stories like this, since they seem to appeal to what people want to be true rather than what is necessarily happening.

There are a lot of businesses quietly and conservatively implementing AI and seeing real results - it's just the crazy Jerry Springer blowups you hear about!

[wpm]

Yes, but that only some businesses do that flys in the face of the breathless, borderline psychotic boosterism a lot of us tend to hear quite a lot of, that AI is gojng to revolutionize everything.

[customguy]

Companies don't advertise their wins (the real results), what they advertise is just as or more offensive but not a win (not really real results), but the outraged Jerry Springer crowd with their hair on fire wants drama. Media is literally a multi dollar business these days, they'd do anything to boost their stocks further, so they provide that drama. Best to ignore all of that and focus on what is hidden from view and therefore real and serious.

[toomuchtodo]

Do you have examples of customer facing real results you could share?

[AussieWog93]

Directly customer facing is a tough one, since a lot of the time chatbots are used to just fob off customers that eat up a lot of time (old people complaining etc).

I think the best experience I've had is when companies offer an MCP server that lets me get up and going with their product very quickly. Sequenzy is one such example I tried, very AI-first and works well with Codex.

If you're talking about stuff that isn't customer facing, there's all kinds of tasks that can and have been automated.

As a simple example, I run a retro games business and we've vibecoded up various controller/cartridge testing apps that have dropped the time it takes to test a box of product by around 50%. I'm planning to spin up a few Hermes agents soon to watch the prices of things and suggest improvements to our listings (e.g. noticing we haven't soldas many copies of Super Mario 64 as we should, and checking our keywords/pricing).

Obviously puts in big work with SaaS and stuff too.

EDIT: actually, Shopify's built-in agent works really well and is directly customer facing. It's a smart model (I think either a Kimi or Qwen as a base) that seems to have been fine tuned on their product itself.

You can ask it stuff like "what products have seen a decrease in sales" or "what is the value of my next payout" and it just answers them.

Before you had to manually write DB queries for this stuff, or more realistically just ignore it.

[asdf88990]

MCP is just API, and we have been there already and we know what happens: Businesses realise they can’t extract maximal value if they don’t own the interface so they recant the API.

[dgellow]

> There are a lot of businesses quietly and conservatively implementing AI and seeing real results

Any example of companies who reported a positive ROI thanks to AI?

[dzhiurgis]

https://www.promptthatforyou.com/?prompt=Any%20example%20of%...

[munk-a]

But then number would go down... number can't go down!

[kotaKat]

> I wonder why no one brought that up as a solution?

Ooh! Ooh! I'm a local! I've used Kinney Drugs before.

They literally just can't find the work in the middle of nowhere (on top of not paying living wages). This region is a vast desert and we've lost every other major pharmacy.

"Living wage" up here is also kinda tricky because supposedly people seem to live just fine on minimum wage up here (provided you somehow had good enough credit to get housing in the first place). Things are /generally/ cheap, but there's still an unspoken "the boomers are just fine because they already own their house" up here.

We can't support a Walgreens, we can't support a CVS, we can barely support Walmart pharmacies. All you have for a choice up here is Kinney Drugs or Walmart Pharmacy.

And on top of that, as a former Kinney customer (pre-Burt): they really didn't do a good job in the first place. They suck.

I disagree that "AI" is the major issue on top of Kinney's problems, they've also recently transitioned to a "centralized filling" system in prior months that has caused quite frankly the largest amounts of frustration among customers. They continually fail to fill prescriptions that come into the local pharmacies, instead sending them out to central fill, and every time you show up at the pharmacy it's a "come back tomorrow" because it didn't come on the truck. At this point I don't even back down from that like the rest of the elderly customers, I perk up, tell them it's bullshit, they have stock, and suddenly the teenager punches a few buttons and go "we can have it ready in 20 minutes sir".

But yes, the Burt IVR bullshit is also equally bad and they really keep peddling it in the stores. I've wanted to punch the stupid cardboard standee in the face a couple times.

[asdf88990]

Because corporates operate on a religion with forever changing principles with trends and speaking against the vogue trend is taboo.

[LetsGetTechnicl]

Just another example of using AI as the solution when the real solution is obvious and here.