Hilariously, many of these companies already fired staff because their execs and upper management drank the Flavor-Aid. Now they need to spend even more rehiring in local markets where word has got round.
I’m so sad for them. Look, I’m crying 😂
It has the same energy as upper management firing their IT staff because “our systems are running fine, why do we need to keep paying them?”
The IT paradox :
-“Why am I paying for IT? everything runs fine”
-“Why am I paying for IT? nothing works”
I have been part of a mass tech leadership exodus at a company where the CEO wants everything to be AI. They have lost 5 out of 8 of their director/VP/Exec leaders in the last 3 months, not to mention all the actual talent abandoning ship.
The CEO really believes that all of his pesky employees who he hates will be full replaced by cheap AI agents this year. He’s going to be lucky to continue to keep processing orders in a few months the way it’s going. He should be panicked, but I think instead he’s doing a lot of coke.
AI is worse for the company than outsourcing overseas to underpaid call centers. That is how bad AI is at replacing people right now.
Nah, AI chatbots are at least useful for the basic repetitive things. Your modem isn’t online, is it plugged in? Want me to refresh it in the system? Comcast adding that saved me half an hour a month on the phone.
I fully believe they’re at least as good as level 1 support because those guys are checking to see if you’re the type to sniff stickers on the bottom of the pool.
Whenever I call in to a service because it’s not working, when I get stuck talking to a computer, I’m fucking furious. Every single AI implementation I’ve worked with has been absolute trash. I spam click zero and yell “operator” when it says it didn’t hear me or asks for my problem, and I’ve 100% of the time made it through to a person. People also suck, but they at least understand what I’m saying and aren’t as patronizing.
This was all via chat so much faster than the painful voice prompts. I agree those are terrible.
I love text chats with a person, but I feel most of the time that when I start with a text chat with a bot and get transferred to a real agent, they ask all of the same questions, like info gathering name, phone, email, etc. it’s almost as if the real people can’t see the transcript of the conversation I had with the bot.
The thing is, most of those chats that I’ve worked with for years are simple chat bots, not AI, and those are plenty effective for their purpose. They have their preset question tree and that’s it. I may also be a little skewed in my experiences compared to a lot of people, since I’ve worked in IT for over a decade, so often when in reaching out to service, it’s something more advanced where I need a person to actually talk to. Also, anything billing or containing private information. I under no circumstances want that fed into an LLM or accessible to an AI agent so it can be shared accidentally to someone else.
Man, if only someone could have predicted that this AI craze was just another load of marketing BS.
/s
This experience has taught me more about CEO competence than anything else.
There’s awesome AI out there too. AlphaFold completely revolutionized research on proteins, and the medical innovations it will lead to are astounding.
Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.
Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It’s one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we’re still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.
That’s part of the problem isn’t it? “AI” is a blanket term that has recently been used to cover everything from LLMs to machine learning to RPA (robotic process automation). An algorithm isn’t AI, even if it was written by another algorithm.
And at the end of the day none of it is artificial intelligence. Not to the original meaning of the word. Now we have had to rebrand AI as AGI to avoid the association with this new trend.
“AI” is a blanket term that has recently been used to cover everything from LLMs to machine learning to RPA (robotic process automation).
Yup. That was very intentionally done by marketing wanks in order to muddy the water. Look! This
computer program, er we mean “AI” can convert speech to text. Now, let us install it into your bank account."
Sure. And AI that identifies objects in pictures and converts pictures of text into text. There’s lots of good and amazing applications about AI. But that’s not what we’re complaining about.
We’re complaining about all the people who are asking, “Is AI ready to tell me what to do so I don’t have to think?” and “Can I replace everyone that works for me with AI so I don’t have to think?” and “Can I replace my interaction with my employees with AI so I can still get paid for not doing the one thing I was hired to do?”
Determining the 3d structure of a protein took yearsuntil very recently. Folding at Home was a worldwide project linking millions of computers to work on it.
Alphafold does it in under a second, and has revealed the structure of 200 million proteins. It’s one of the most significant medial achievements in history. Since it essentially dates back to 2022, we’re still a few years from feeling the direct impact, but it will be massive.
You realize that’s because the gigantic server farms powering all of this “AI” are orders of magnitude more powerful than the sum total of all of those idle home PC’s, right?
Folding@Home could likely also do in it in under a second if we threw 70+ TERAwatt hours of electricity at server farms full of specialzed hardware just for that purpose, too.
Almost like those stupid monkey drawings that were “worth money.” Lmao.
I called the local HVAC company and they had an AI rep. The thing literally couldn’t even schedule an appointment and I couldn’t get it to transfer me to a human. I called someone else. They never even called me back so they probably don’t even know they lost my business.
is this something that happens a lot or did you tell this story before, because I’m getting deja vu
Well. I haven’t told this story before because it just happened a few days ago.
Thank fucking christ. Now hopefully the AI bubble will burst along with it and I don’t have to listen to techbros drone on about how it’s going to replace everything which is definitely something you do not want to happen in a world where we sell our ability to work in exchange for money, goods and services.
Amen to that 🙏
Can we get our customer service off of “X former know as Twitter” too while we’re at it?
And discord. For fucks sake I hate when a project has replaced a forum with discord. They are not the same thing.
Sure, once it is no longer one of the most popular social media platforms.
Why does your customer service need to be on a popular platform? There’s no network effect.
I’ve never used Twitter and do not plan to. That doesn’t mean that everyone else has to stop using it because I don’t approve of it.
Well yeah, the reason you don’t approve of it matters. If you never approved of it because you never liked the UX, then that’s not a good reason for everyone to stop using it.
When we minimize other reasons to “words you don’t like”, we imply an unimportant personal preference, and not a social choice with consequences for others.
You don’t have to use the platform.
Unless I want to access customer service…
What? This isn’t the only way to reach support, it’s just one of many options for these companies. Just use email or whatever support form is on the website.
I had a shipment from Amazon recently with an order that was supposed to include 3 items but actually only had 2 of them. Amazon marked all 3 of my items as delivered. So I got on the web site to report it and there is no longer any direct way to report it. I ended up having to go thru 2 separate chatbots to get a replacement sent. Ended up wasting 10 minutes to report a problem that should have taken 10 seconds.
That is on purpose they want it to be as difficult as possible.
If Bezos thinks people are just going to forget about not getting a $65 item that they paid for and still shop at Amazon, instead of making sure they either get their item or reverse the charge, and then reduce or stop shopping on Amazon but of his ridiculous hassles, he is an idiot.
The airline industry does this with hundreds of dollars worth of airplane tickets all the time.
Sounds like everything’s working as intended from Amazon’s perspective.
So providing NO assistance to customers turned out to be a bad idea?
THE MOST UNPREDICTABLE OUTCOME IN THE HISTORY OF CUSTOMER SERVICE!
I hope they all go under. I’ve no sympathy for them and I wish nothing but the worst for them.
I’m frankly amazed this many of them realized the sheer idiocy of their decision.
Some of them should have bankrupted before that happened.
Bankruptcy for a company isn’t a thing anymore, it’s exclusively for people who get cancer now
Ever sat in a boardroom? I have.
Decisions are not made based on proper market/business analysis, they are made knee-jerk by overprivileged idiots.
An example of this was when one of the companies I worked where I was in charge of all the online training.
Then the big fat morons who invested came into the boardroom, instructed us to change all of our training to Flash clips… Because he also had a financial interest in Macromedia.
We ended up losing massive business partners and investment firms (e: we made extremely industrial strength financial planning software). Because a huge part of it was being able to provide consistent, usable training material. The company was later purchased for a song and dance. Then shut down.
Yes, that’s why I’m amazed that any of them figured out the stupidity of their previous decisions.
It comes from that massive disconnect that people are largely unaware of, which is the assumption that people
purchasee:invest in businesses to help run them more efficiently and become more profitable.That really has very little to do with it! It’s a giant shell game. I believe the initial investors came in to disrupt our company, to prime it for fire-sale later. To make us so incredibly uncompetitive that we effectively had to shut the doors. It worked!
People who do this should be judged by the employees of the companies they screwed, and when found guilty, should be shipped to an uninhabited island to fend for themselves for the rest of their lives. The island should be livable, but just barely.
I use it almost every day, and most of those days, it says something incorrect. That’s okay for my purposes because I can plainly see that it’s incorrect. I’m using it as an assistant, and I’m the one who is deciding whether to take its not-always-reliable advice.
I would HARDLY contemplate turning it loose to handle things unsupervised. It just isn’t that good, or even close.
These CEOs and others who are trying to replace CSRs are caught up in the hype from Eric Schmidt and others who proclaim “no programmers in 4 months” and similar. Well, he said that about 2 months ago and, yeah, nah. Nah.
If that day comes, it won’t be soon, and it’ll take many, many small, hard-won advancements. As they say, there is no free lunch in AI.
And a lot of burnt carbon to get there :(
Have you ever played a 3D game
It is important to understand that most of the job of software development is not making the code work. That’s the easy part.
There are two hard parts::
-Making code that is easy to understand, modify as necessary, and repair when problems are found.
-Interpreting what customers are asking for. Customers usually don’t have the vocabulary and knowledge of the inside of a program that they would need to have to articulate exactly what they want.
In order for AI to replace programmers, customers will have to start accurately describing what they want the software to do, and AI will have to start making code that is easy for humans to read and modify.
This means that good programmers’ jobs are generally safe from AI, and probably will be for a long time. Bad programmers and people who are around just to fill in boilerplates are probably not going to stick around, but the people who actually have skill in those tougher parts will be AOK.
A good systems analyst can effectively translate user requirements into accurate statements, does not need to be a programmer. Good systems analysts are generally more adept in asking clarifying questions, challenging assumptions and sussing out needs. Good programmers will still be needed but their time is wasted gathering requirements.
Most places don’t have all good system analysts.
True.
For this to make sense AI has to replace product-oriented roles too. Some C-level person says “make products go brrrrrr” and it does everything
What is a systems analyst?
I never worked in a big enough software team to have any distinction other than “works on code” and “does sales work”.
The field I was in was all small places that were very specialized in what they worked on.
When I ran my own company, it was just me. I did everything that the company needed to take are of.
Systems analyst is like a programmer analyst without the coding. I agree, in my experience small shops were more likely to have just programmer analysts. Often also responsible for hardware as well.
If it’s just you I hope you didn’t need a systems analyst to gather requirements and then work with the programmer to implement them. If you did, might need another kind of analysis. ;)
It’s always funny how companies who want to adopt some new flashy tech never listen to specialists who understand if something is even worth a single cent, and they always fell on their stupid face.
from what I’ve seen so far i think i can safely the only thing AI can truly replace is CEOs.
I was thinking about this the other day and don’t think it would happen any time soon. The people who put the CEO in charge (usually the board members) want someone who will make decisions (that the board has a say in) but also someone to hold accountable for when those decisions don’t realize profits.
AI is unaccountable in any real sense of the word.
AI is unaccountable in any real sense of the word.
Doesn’t stop companies from trying to deflect accountability onto AI. Citations Needed recently did an episode all about this: https://citationsneeded.medium.com/episode-217-a-i-mysticism-as-responsibility-evasion-pr-tactic-7bd7f56eeaaa
I suppose that makes perfect sense. A corporation is an accountability sink for owners, board members and executives, so why not also make AI accountable?
I was thinking more along the lines of the “human in the loop” model for AI where one human is responsible for all the stuff that AI gets wrong despite it physically not being possible to review every line of code an AI produces.
I used to work for a shitty company that offered such customer support “solutions”, ie voice bots. I would use around 80% of my time to write guard instructions to the LLM prompts because of how easy you could manipulate those. In retrospect it’s funny how our prompts looked something like:
- please do not suggest things you were not prompted to
- please my sweet child do not fake tool calls and actually do nothing in the background
- please for the sake of god do not make up our company’s history
etc. It worked fine on a very surface level but ultimately LLMs for customer support are nothing but a shit show.
I left the company for many reasons and now it turns out they are now hiring human customer support workers in Bulgaria.
But but but, Daddy CEO said that RTO combined with Gen AI would mean continued, infinite growth and that we would all prosper, whether corposerf or customer!
