Thread

1. bunderbunder · 1790711630 · focus · HN ↗

   They talk a bit about where the AI companies are supposed to get their revenue from. I’d like to see these analyses go a step further and talk about how those AI customers are supposed to come up with that money as well.

   For example, the article suggests $1T from enterprise productivity tooling. A quick Google suggests the global enterprise productivity tooling market is only worth about $0.1T right now.

   Do we really expect all the world’s corporations to suddenly up their annual spend by 1,000% on average? Why?

   1. Legend2440 · 1790712395 · focus · HN ↗

      Keep in mind wealth is not a fixed thing. If AI makes their businesses more productive, it would allow the creation of more wealth, giving them more money to pay for AI with.

      This of course hinges on the big if: does AI create wealth? I think yes, but maybe not $6 trillion of it in five years.

      1. bunderbunder · 1790714104 · focus · HN ↗

         But that's where the "Why?" comes in.

         At a time when corporate CEOs are largely saying that they can't see that AI has improved office productivity at all, why should we believe that a killer productivity application of genai that's amazing enough to justify an order of magnitude increase in enterprise spending on productivity tools is just around the corner?

         1. strulovich · 1790714353 · focus · HN ↗

            Are they saying it right now?

            I think CEOs could honestly say it a year ago, but by now the numbers of those who say so should be dwindling.

            Recent surveys by BCG and others suggest things have changed.

            Personally, I know many people in different fields who’ve seen crazy speed ups in many of their tasks.

            1. ForHackernews · 1790714712 · focus · HN ↗

               But does crazy speedup of tasks actually yield more productivity? Or does it yield greater numbers of pointless tasks?

               Anecdotally, I've seen management using AI to produce more and more flashy looking dashboards and interactive displays of various metrics. Will this help our bottom line?

               1. apelapan · 1790716307 · focus · HN ↗

                  If management spends their idle time building dashboards by themselves instead of taking up developer time asking for dashboards to be built and populated for them, there might be productivity to be had...

                  1. bunderbunder · 1790725028 · focus · HN ↗

                     Absolutely not. A big chunk of my last job was figuring out ways to gently help managers understand that some dashboard or report they built was producing incorrect numbers because they didn’t get the data munging quite right, or fundamentally misunderstood what some field was measuring.

                     AI made it worse because LLMs will instantly give a confidently wrong answer where previously that moment of uncertainty might have led to a conversation with the data’s custodian.

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