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WarmWashtoday at 2:44 PM5 repliesview on HN

>why so many companies are now saying they see zero ROI from AI efforts.

I strongly suspect this is because workers are pocketing the gains for themselves. Report XYZ usually takes a week to write. It now takes a day. The other 4 days are spent looking busy.

The MIT report that found all these companies were getting nowhere with AI, also found that almost every worker was using AI almost daily. But using their personal account rather than the corporate one.


Replies

onionisafruittoday at 3:02 PM

If that were the case, this site and certain subreddits would have a lot of posts and comments with people crowing about how much time they are getting back. I haven’t seen that, but I haven’t gone looking for it either.

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everforwardtoday at 4:57 PM

While not dispositive of your idea, I think some portion of people using their personal accounts is because we collectively lack good feedback loops on the effectiveness of “AI addons” like RAG. The corporate accounts can be legitimately less useful than a “stock” account because the AI team integrates everything under the sun to show value, but the integrations become a net negative.

Ie ones that index entire company wikis. It ends up regurgitating rejected or not implemented RFCs, or docs from someone’s personal workflow that requires setting up a bunch of stuff locally to work, or etc.

A lot of tasks are not dependent on internal documentation, and it just ends up polluting the context with irrelevant, outdated or just wrong information.

adithyassekhartoday at 4:25 PM

Quiet the contrary, companies layoff all roles (frontend, backend, qa, devops, even ui/ux) and handle a project to one competent dev. And asks them to deliver it in 1/3rd the time it would have took with a proper team. It's happening at places I know. This thread on reddit is 100% same: https://www.reddit.com/r/developersIndia/s/EIksvB15tm

I can't even imagine the stress from context switching, and since people don't realize this is still work, they do this late into the night as well.

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torawaytoday at 4:52 PM

That’s certainly a … convenient … explanation.

beachtaxidrivertoday at 4:04 PM

Because the amount of ai slop code from peers and the amount of ai slop emails to read from management has exploded.