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Comment by random_cynic | Hacker News Reader

> They are aggressively integrating it into their products

And no reason to suspect that it won't spectacularly backfire. Not that they're integrating (or more correctly slapping it on with some hot glue) transformative technology they barely understand into legacy products which are themselves likely to go defunct. Why even use a spreadsheet when you can get GPT-4 to write a whole data analysis pipeline and summarize everything? Or why bother with word documents when GPT-4 can generate, spell/grammar check, translate (if necessary), format and output into any format you want?

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From a practical perspective, because of inertia and all managers seemingly being "burned once, twice shy" on re-designs.

If my company already uses spreadsheets and teams of people skilled at manipulating them, it might not be very hard to convince my manager that good AI use cases (quick formatting, intelligent auto-completes, intention detection from sheet structure) could probably speed us up by 20% - but convincing management of the value of a full system re-design by comparison would likely be a very tough sell, if not viewed as an insult or sign that I'm not a team player.

Just because the future may prove these methods antiquated doesn't mean management is liable or likely to change their tune today.

> good AI use cases (quick formatting, intelligent auto-completes, intention detection from sheet structure) could probably speed us up by 20%

That would imply these AI systems have been integrated well, which in most cases are not and I suspect the amount of work it would take to do it properly would not pay off considering the limited window available before people transition to a fully chat based system.

> but convincing management of the value of a full system re-design by comparison would likely be a very tough sell

In this case it would be convincing the management to transition to a system where you can just order around and someone/something would get the job done, which is well in their comfort zone (I'm only half joking).

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