alt Hacker NewsPlaying out in company after company right now:
CEOs: “Get me some of that GenAI”
CTO: “OK, we have all the GenAI”
CEOs: “Employees, it’s AI or bust”
Employees: Tokenmax
CFO: “Um, this is costing a ton and we’re not seeing savings or efficiency materialize.”
CEO: “Are we getting any value out of this?”
COO: “Not really, and frankly I’m getting annoyed at all the AI slop turning up all over.”
CEO: “OK, well, let’s do a big layoff and then I’ll just say it was because of AI. Hopefully folks won’t blame me for the mess and I’ll just talk about how amazing AI is.”
Replies
> Hopefully folks won’t blame me for the mess
Lesson #1 from business school : take all credits, put the blame on others, if there no easy scapegoat blame the "economical context"
Lesson #2 and beyond : just see lesson #1, it's enough. You've made it and it's ALL thanks to this amazing business school degree you got, now go profits with your new already wealthy peers.
These are golden times for AI consulting. We're getting into that business because it is up for grabs. Everybody as AI FOMO right now and begging people to take their money. Exactly what you are highlighting. And, yet, nobody has the beginning of a clue what to do or how to do stuff with AI. That's classic consulting territory.
My analysis of the whole space is that all the tech people are focused on completely the wrong end of the problem space (model quality, training, token cost, etc.). They are geeking out on that stuff. Worse, they are mostly not even that good at using their own tools. I regularly talk to so called "AI native" companies that are hiring enterprise sales people to do sales like it's 2006 instead of 2026. Their product is AI native, but their companies aren't.
The real issues are on the low level plumbing end. How do you connect all the data silos you have. Are they even the right silos still? And once you fix that: how do you get organized around tapping into those. What guardrails do you need? How do you deal with compliance issues? Etc. You don't need to do a lot to get value back. Most people haven't gone there yet.
Mostly people actually already have and pay for the tools that would enable a lot more if only they knew how: ChatGPT, Codex, Manus, Perlexity Computer, Claude CoWork, etc.
What you are outlining is funny but true. The issue isn't money or tools but figuring out what to do with the tools you already bought.