Ask HN: What would happen if your company stopped using all AI tomorrow?

8•jc_811•1h ago

This is something I’ve been turning over in my head lately. I’m not denying AI is being used everywhere, but I don’t know if it’s actually helping businesses overall. If we shut it all down it seems that businesses would be fine (and maybe even better since there’d be no token burning budgets).

Comments

conmod278•37m ago

In support, we chuck in the logs and get detailed analysis of possible problems and causes. AI based support request handling has been literally Godsend.

wax66•31m ago

Pretty much nothing. We'd remove the AI integrations, the UI elements, then back to where we were. Luckily, we have no load bearing AI.

But if everyone else got to keep their AI, we'd lose customers very quickly.

joshuamoyers•24m ago

so ironic to see “load bearing” in a comment about removing AI. certain phrases have been ruined by fable/opus 5 for all time.

vips7L•30m ago

I’d have to stop interacting with meat proxies and wouldn’t have to read copy pasted LLM text.

temp_praneshp•14m ago

If it were just my company and not the whole industry for some newly discovered reason/vulnerability, I would quit because leadership has gone retarded.

chuckgreenman•11m ago

I would guess that AI has given me a 30% improvement in pace? I don't know, it would feel like riding a bike on level ground instead of downhill

oldsklgdfth•7m ago

I generally agree that the business does not see increased productivity and revenue from AI, if it does it is small enough to be within error.

That said, if everyone (not just devs) came in and there was no AI, the org would come to a halt. AI is load-bearing in my company. Everything from dev, code reviews, planning, doc writing, ops heavily uses AI. I mean heavily, there are dev that would not know where to start triaging an alarm without the robots. Same with customer service. So much of the human capital has leaked out of peoples' brains that is fair to compare it to brain drain.

Realistically, it would be painful for 1-3 months. People would go to teams with AI. A year from now, leadership is gonna have a hard time justifying keeping the lights out.

It is akin to asking "what would happen if your company stopped using the internet(to look things up)".

How Cyber Sleuths Tracked a Nigerian Scammer to His Doorstep

OpenCrew: Open-source multi-agent orchestration on top of Claude Code

Bulletproof Hosting Watch: Week of 2026-08-31

National Association of Consumer Advocates vs. Polymarket et al.

Tim Cook's full memo to Apple employees on his last day as CEO

Birth order and disease risk across the human phenome

Running Venezuela: The Return of the American Protectorate?

I built semantic search over 167k published patient cases

Hugging Face says sales for its robot ducks topped $2.6M in 24 hours

What tech stack do your YC (or non-YC) startups use?

Nobody Has Actually Built a Software Factory

Show HN: E-Ink Optimized Manga for KOreader, Kindle, Kobo, ReMarkable with KCC

The End of the End of History

Apple may change 'Lake Ontario' to 'Lake America' soon after talk with Trump

OpenAI's ad business hits $1B annualized revenue run rate

Cutlass: LLM-first open source video editor

Utah researchers peer into the nuclear testing history kept in our fingernails

AI PCB Design with KiCAD and open tooling

Common Root – The Abrahamic scriptures, side by side

Show HN: Scoring 4,811 job tasks against machine capability, 1970–2041

Undocumented Atari Slapstic side-channel in a Marble Madness reimplementation

Unpacking OpenAI's sphere packing result

DuctTape Collective

Twenty-One Miles – How far from a road you can get in the lower 48

Show HN: Preview Postgres writes from AI agents with xmin checks (pg-dry-run)

Order from disorder: do we need a new law of physics?

Oscar Winner Brings Monsters to Life with His Simulation Software

Apple Watch Ultra 4 will differentiate itself from prior models

'The forgotten empire': When Russia colonised California

Edit and present slides in Markdown with AI