AI Doesn't Have ROI

https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-doesnt-have-roi/

27•crescit_eundo•54m ago

Comments

cmiles8•15m ago

Companies are slamming the brakes on AI in a massive reversal that’s unlike anything I’ve seen in the last 25 years in tech.

6 months ago it was use AI all the time go! Now companies are putting use limitations in place, strict budget controls, and the wagons are circling around various “AI labs” trams that cost a ton and have shown little to no ROI.

It was all fun and games until the bill arrived. Now it seems there’s a mad rush for AI companies to IPO before the music truly stops.

Insanity•10m ago

Yeah, there's just this massive wave of AI delusion turning into disillusion. Writing code was never the slow part of enterprise development. We've made the slow part _somewhat_ faster, trading off quality in turn all while burning hundreds of thousands of dollars in tokens.

It's no surprise that when ROI remains elusive (it's hard to measure for any knowledge work) and costs are skyrocketing that the C-suite wants to slam the brakes.

alain94040•4m ago

Not my experience at all. One slow part was coding. AI takes care of that. But more importantly, the slow part was iterating through concepts, ideas, and prototypes. I thought people on this site embraced lean startups and agile development. AI really helps make that feedback loop 10X faster. I can do an experiment, show it to coworkers and get feedback in a morning, for something that would have taken me almost a week in the past. So now we can try a lot more options, whereas before, we kept getting hit by the sunk cost fallacy: I spent a week on this, I really don't want to start again from scratch with this other approach that may or may not be better.

procgen•7m ago

Demand is high and will remain so. Supply just needs to catch up.

cmiles8•4m ago

Honestly that’s the trap that’s increasingly looking like it will blow up this whole thing. Nobody can seem to point to any viable revenue pathway that justifies the amount of capital investment underway, all while folks are increasingly slamming the brakes on things.

Theres an extremely ugly financial picture developing that whose with full blown AI psychosis appear unable, or simply are unwilling, to see.

vanuatu•3m ago

I've seen many cases where AI led to ROI with high margins (maybe not enough to justify the entire industry capex though), but they usually share similar features

- AI is a component of a larger product sold

- The product improves the metrics that customers care about, typically autonomously

- The customer is paying for the outcome, regardless of whether or not the product had AI in it

'Copilot' style AI features are much harder to measure ROI on, because they are typically further away from the base metrics that make it easy to measure ROI, and are typically used for specific tasks in a long web of other tasks within a professional job

stevenjgarner•2m ago

Yes it does - the ROI is replacing the global labor market => the replaced workers stop earning income. They cut spending. The businesses they used to patronize see revenue decline => the company that fired its workers to save money discovers that its customers were, in aggregate, other companies’ workers. Revenue growth stalls. [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48324712