AI: Are you sick of it?
My current company is not replacing techs as they leave, constantly telling us we need to use the tools we're provided better, and always, always badgering us about getting more billable hours on fixed capital costs, long-term assets.
The company is holding steady at a small profit, about 3% this year, which is better than a lot of tech companies now.
I can't give specific about an AI project the executives put forward, for obvious reasons
My current company executives seem to have an unlimited AI budget. In over a year, the extremely well paid internal team only products are showing other companies downloaded PDF's. Most of their time is regularly visiting consulting firms, getting AI specific training and going to conventions.
After discovering the IA project would cost more than a million in consulting time just for architecting the production infrastructure, excluded development costs, on-going expenses were nearly as much as the humans it would replace, but with much worse results, the project was canned.
Worse, there is a much better funded identical AI products that being developed in the US, but no one thought to approach to see if we could license.
The team still exists, looking for new insane projects.
The Guardian: ‘Can AI sit there in a fleece vest?’: John Mulaney’s Salesforce roast was a masterclass in corporate comedy
Last week, John Mulaney looked out on a crowd of corporate Salesforce employees and told them they were “imminently replaceable.
“You look like a group who looked at the self-checkout counters at CVS and thought, ‘This is the future,’” the comedian said. “If AI is truly smarter than us and tells us that [humans] should die, then I think we should die. So many of you feel imminently replaceable.”
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Mulaney poked fun at corporate-speak – “the fact that there are 45,000 ‘trailblazers’ here couldn’t devalue the title any more” – and tech bro stereotypes: “Can AI sit there in a fleece vest? Can AI not go to events and spend all day at a bar?” He also referenced his son, who is almost three, saying: “We’re just two guys hitting Wiffle balls badly and yelling ‘good job’ at each other. It’s sort of the same energy here at Dreamforce.”
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