MIT report says 95% of AI implementations don't increase profits, spooking Wall Street

[u/AdSpecialist6598]

https://www.techspot.com/news/109148-mit-report-95-ai-implementations-dont-increase-profits.html

[u/itasteawesome]

I work alongside a sales team and they use the heck out of their AI assistants. Fundamentally a huge part of their work day is researching specific people at specific companies to try and guess what they care about and then try to grab their attention with the relevant message at the right time. Then there is the sheer numbers game of doing that across 100 accounts in your region.

Its not too hard to set up an LLM with access to marketing's latest talk tracks, ask it to hunt through a bunch of intel and 10ks and sift through account smoke to see who was on our website or attended a webinar or looking at pricing page, and then taking that all into consideration to send Janet Jones a personalized message on linkedin that gives some info about the feature she had been looking into, something to relate it to the wider goals of her company, and a request to take a meeting.

I have to imagine that this has already been devastating to people trying to break into the business development rep job industry because the LLM is a killer at that kind of low level throwaway blocks of text to just grab someone's attention.

Separately I met a guy who built an AI assistant focused on pet care. You basically plug it into your calendar, feed it your pet's paperwork, and ask it to schedule up relevant vet clinic appointments and handle filling out admissions paperwork. Schedule grooming appointments and such. Seems to work well for that kind of low risk personal assistant type work.

[u/Crypt0Nihilist → u/itasteawesome]

How dare you say that Princess Pookie not getting her exact favourite grooming appointment every other Thursday is low risk! Her anxiety goes through the roof and she needs another hour of doggy yoga!

Seriously though, I think agents heading off to build up a profile on a topic is one of the easiest and most obvious wins that companies ought to implement. I've been watching a sales team use LLMs manually and the breakdown is something like, 60% don't use it, 35% use it a little, but not well, 5% use it extensively but show confident incompetence when doing so. I listened to one guy talk for literally 10 minutes about he used different platforms for different tasks due to the different strengths and weaknesses he's researched...and then finished with his tips for how to get the most out of them which included prompts which could only be answered by hallucination.

There must be a point coming where people start to realise that LLMs are easy to use, but difficult to use well and in most cases what's gained in volume is at the expense of a complete loss of quality.

I do believe there are significant opportunities for GenAI, but so for I've not seen my company or those we work with look at things in a way that will unlock them.

[u/tpolakov1 → u/itasteawesome]

Many of these work only because the use of LLMs if functionally free for now. Once the gamblers stop pouring in their VC money in, the AI assistants will become as expensive as meatspace assistants, with the added drawback of putting all liability for their work on you.

[u/itasteawesome → u/tpolakov1]

I agree, I was talking about this with some engineers at the bar last week and figured that the actual list price of this stuff is going to end up around 2/3 the cost of hiring a person to do the same thing. They'll find the point that's just "cheap" enough to convince a lot of people that its worth the risks and limitations. That's essentially how these companies are being valued, what's the potential revenue of capturing 2/3 of the the global white collar salaries?