Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration; the vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P&L.

The research—based on 150 interviews with leaders, a survey of 350 employees, and an analysis of 300 public AI deployments—paints a clear divide between success stories and stalled projects.

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[–] 47 points 1 year ago (9 children)

Wait, we have AI flying planes now?

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  • [+] 12 points 1 year ago* (1 child)
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Conversely, AI running ATC would be a very good thing. To a point.

    It's been technically feasible for a while to handle 99% of what an ATC does automatically. The problem is that you really want a human to step in on those 1% of situations where things get complicated and really dangerous. Except, the human won't have their skills sharpened through constant use unless they're handling at least some of the regular traffic.

    Trick has been to have the AI do, say, 70% of the job, but having a human step in sometimes. Deciding on when to have a human step in is the hard problem.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    what do you think an autopilot is?

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago (11 children)

    Yeah, 95% of AI companies either have no functional product or a chatGPT token account and a prompt.

    Most of them could be replaced by a high school student and an N8N instance.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    You mention N8N. Last week I had a sales VP mention it as well. Could you elaborate on your perspective? I've been building databases in BigQuery for the past month and will start utilizing ML for a business need so I probably missed some write up about it.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    N8N is like IFTTT (if this then that)

    It's a mostly codeless solution for wiring things together, meaning you can use semi-non-skilled labor to do somewhat difficult things.

    This guy can be a little hard to stomach for some, but he goes into great depth on setting up some n8n use cases, and he doesn't waste a lot of time doing it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONgECvZNI3o

    Right now, we use it so that if IT puts a certain emoji on a slack message, it makes a jira ticket, letting us know that work has been triaged and created, but if a user does it, it fails.

    You could have N8N read a slack channel, or load an RSS feed, or take input from a website, send that data through an LLM prompt to transform the data and then have it or an agent do some work or respond to the input, with minimal need to write code. Really the limits are what services it supports (or your ability to add that API) and your imagination.

    In Chuck's example, he had N8N load several RSS feeds, make thumbnails from them, read the description, and use an LLM to shorten the text without losing meaning and provide a clean list of media to a Discord channel.

    https://n8n.io/integrations/google-bigquery/and/openai/

    You could define a trigger, say have a chatbot or Slack channel, have it hit your BigQuery, send the data to GPT to make it human-readable, and respond to requests in the channel with some futzing around in logins, flowcharting, and JavaScript variable names..

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    I'm a program manager, have some small coding experience.

    N8n is like Legos of API access you can generate tons of integrations that would have otherwise been imposible with just a few hours of work. We have an issue where people don't complete their slack profiles. Using n8n I made an integration between our HR software and slack so that it automatically populates most fields without having to bug people.

    And after that, it runs a check for what manual thing they are missing and sends them a message.

    You put an http block, behind a filter block, behind a slack blog and it handles everything for you.

    Would recommend you give it a try, I have it running on the work instance but I also have a local one running in my raspberry that I plan to use to fool around.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Most of them could be replaced by a high school student and an N8N instance.

    Not really sure if the high school students have cheated their way out with ChatGPT.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    At the moment, there are probably doing pretty good. Kind of like using calculators, when we got out of school we all had a calculator.

    Were the rubber is going to meet the road It's when the AI bubble bursts and there's no over generous evaluations and free venture capital, and we actually need to pay a sustainable fee for the tokens.

    They're going to need some really expensive calculators

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Well, I didn’t think about it like that!

    Hopefully there’s still students that use it as a mere tool rather than as a way to pass by without actually learning.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Hopefully anyone majoring in a subject is there because they want to learn the subject and we won't lose the capability. The people that aren't in it for the education won't fair as well when LLM's become the new rent :)

    The real damage is the companies paying for the LLMs for their subpar, cheap employees, though. Those English majors are having a hard enough time finding work.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah every single day the top 5 new products on ProductHunt are AI trash. It's wild what the bubble has become

    Today:

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Oh shit, I see elevenlabs on that list, They do tend to stir stuff up.

    They used to have paid voice actors training imitations of real celebrities. You could do stuff like search out ship captain and get somebody knocking off Picard.

    Looks like they released a music model trained on (paid) licensed material. Even their best sample stuff is kind of marginal, but it is real.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    This sounds about right. Figure 50% are just screaming at their employees to use ai and at managers to lower headcount and make it up with ai and such. Then like 25% more buy some companies ai solution and expect sorta the same from there. Then like 15% actually try to identify where ai could be helpful but don't really listen to feedback and just doggedly move forward. Eventually you get to the ones that identify where it might help and offer options to employees to use it much like any other software where they can request a license and let it grow and help organically and look more to just improve results or productivity.

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  • [+] 17 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Completely agree.

    I've got clients who I can see immediate benefits right now, and I've got clients where I don't think it's a good idea yet. Most of those that could benefit it's small tweaks to workflow processes to save a few FTE here and there, not these massive scale rollouts we're seeing.

    Unfortunately Microsoft, along with other companies, are selling fully scale sexy to executive when full scale sexy isn't actually ready yet. What's available does work for some things, but it's hard to get an executive team to sign off on a project for testing to save only 10 employees worth of work in a 2000 person company when they're simultaneously a) worried about it going horribly wrong, and b) worried about falling behind other companies by not going fast enough.

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  • [–] 37 points 1 year ago

    It's a bubble. This article is by someone realizing that who has yet to move their investments.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Shocked that LLM wrapper slop that isn't deterministic only has limited use cases. Sam Altman is the biggest con artist of our time

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    He’s the second coming of Joseph Smith.

    JS was a charismatic grifter by nature and upbringing who sold folks on the existence of a magic gold book that had extra-special info about American Jesus. He told them he found it after G*d told him where to dig.

    This was just a few years after he had been hauled into court to face charges of running a ‘treasure hunting’ scheme on local farmers.

    Now that I think about it more, the parallels are many.

    In conclusion, shysters gonna shyst.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    A few years ago we haf these stupid mandatory AI classes all about how AI could help you do your job better. It was supposed to be multiple parts but we never got passed the first one. I think they realized it wouldn't help most of the company but did leave our bespoke chatbot up for our customers/sales people. It is pretty good at helping with our products but I assume a lot of tuning has been done. I assume if we fed a local AI our data we could make it helpful but none of them have more than a basic knowledge of anything I do on a day to day basis.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Usually fit those chatbots you take a trained model and use RAG, essentially turning the question into a traditional search and asking the LLM to summarize the contents from the result. So it's frequently a convenient front end to a search engine, which is how it avoid s having to train to produce relevant responses. Is generally just prohibitively difficult in various ways to fine tune LLM through training and manage to get the desired behavior. So it can act like it "knows" about the stuff you do despite zero training if other methods are stuffing the prompts with the right answers.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Good. How do we fix the surviving 5%?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    And the other 5% are bullshitting.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    "Sir how is that going to help me do my job faster?" "Just ask it 'how do I put in fries I'm the bag faster' and then do what it says.'

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  • [+] -11 points 1 year ago

    Decent article with a b. S agenda.

    Its aimed at ages. Younger js better according to the article. So instead of focusing on what the issues with fucking a I are, they get to bring in ages.

    As soon as they start that shit, you I know its to distract from the real issues

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  • [+] -13 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    I have an extremely small company where I am the only employee and AI has let me build and do stuff that I would have needed a small team for the quality of what I went from to what I’m able to do now is really great and it’s thanks to ai.

    I have no formal training for work experience in coding, but I taught myself python, years ago. Additionally, I don’t work in IT, so I think using ai to code has been extremely beneficial.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    So you're saying you have no professional coding experience, yet you know that a team of professionals couldn't produce code at the quality you want?

    Also, saying "extremely small company" when you mean self employed is weird. It's fine to have your own company for a business/contracting.

    I just hope you actually understand the code that has been produced and no customer or company data is at risk.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    Financially, I earn a really low amount. I e been freelance for a while, but am trying to grow the business, so it’s extremely small.

    All the stuff I’m using AI for is just for presentation of internal materials. Nothing critical.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    I feel similar.

    The AI is great for low value tasks that eat time but aren’t difficult nor require high skill, nor are they risky. That’s the stuff that’s traditionally really difficult to automate.

    When I’m actually doing the core parts of my job AI is so awful it’s clear humans are not going anywhere.

    But those annoying side tasks need to get done.

    I’ve set up a bunch of read only AI tool and that’s enough to speed up huge amounts of work.

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