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Comment by kfk | Hacker News Reader

AI hype is really problematic in Enterprise. Big companies are now spending C executive time figuring out a company "AI strategy". This is going to be another cycle of money-wasted/biz-upset, very similar to what I have seen with Big data. The thing in Enterprise is that everyone serious about biz operations knows AI test scores and AI quality is not there, but very few are able to communicate these concerns in a constructive way, rather everyone is embracing the hype because, maybe they get a promotion? Tech, as usual, is very happy to feed the hype and never, as usual, telling businesses honestly that, at best, this is an incremental productivity improvement, nothing life changing. I think the issue is overall lack of honesty, professionalism, and accountability across the board, with tech leading this terrible way of pushing product and "adding value".

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> Tech, as usual, is very happy to feed the hype

I agree completely with you on this.

In defence of the executives however is that some businesses will be seriously affected. Call centres and plagiarism scanner have already been affected, but it’s unclear which industries will be affected too. Maybe the probability is low, but the impact could be very high. In think this reasoning is driving the executives.

Look, I am going to wait and see on this, maybe new facts will make me reconsider. In the meanwhile, github Copilot is just cost to my company, haven't seen much additional productivity. I guess my concern, given how hard is to hire developers and technologists, is replacing simpler job roles, like a customer service representative, with complicated new ones, like "MLOps Engineer".

Copilot cost is a joke unless you're running a sweatshop - it has to boost productivity in minutes/month to justify the cost considering dev salaries.

Personally I think it's priced perfectly - it's a really good typing assistant for obvious code, and helps me stay in flow longer.

In fact I'd pay double for a version with half the latency.

No, it's a joke that you tell me it's ok to pay for something with no clear ROI. Feel free to live in fantasy land, but when you run a business cost counts, this is exactly what I dislike about tech, a lot of talk, but 0 accountability when it comes to how they actually impact the bottom line.

Isn't this the same failing that prevents us from funding basic research or infrastructure? It obviously has positive ROI, but because you can't estimate it more narrowly than between "big" and "huge", you assume it's negative and reject the idea?

>it's a joke that you tell me it's ok to pay for something with no clear ROI.

Can you measure the bottom line impact of using CI/CD, IDEs, static code analysis, source control, whatever tool ? If you don't know the exact numbers and are just guesstimating - are you actually accounting for the costs or just moaning because you don't like the tool ? Who even works with exact ROI numbers for these kinds of decisions ? I can't think of a scenario where accurately determining the ROI of any one thing is possible and it doesn't reduce to gut checks. Pretending it can be measured sounds as naive as people trying to measure developer productivity with fixed metrics.

Cost of Copilot is so low that it's under discretionary spending - it would take more time to figure out the actual value than to pay for people that want it. People already figured out that it's better to just allocate a budget to individuals, let them decide which tools work for them and go trough purchase requisition and approval dance for big ticket/external dependency items where the impact is worth the time spent on making the decision.

It’s rational herd dynamics for the execs. Going against the herd and being wrong is a career ender. Going with the herd and being wrong will be neutral at worst.

Going against the herd and being right can also be a career ender.

Blindly following a trend will likely not end well. But even with previous hype cycles, those companies that identified good use cases, validated those use cases, and had solid execution of the projects leaped ahead. Big Data was genuinely of value to plenty of organizations, and a waste of time for others. IoT was crazy for plenty of orgs ... but also was really valuable to certain segments. Gartner's hype cycle ends with the plateau of productivity for a reason ... you just have to go through the trough of disillusionment first, which is going to come from a the great multitudes of failed and ill-conceived projects.

Identifying an “AI strategy” seems backwards. What they should be doing is identifying the current problems and goals of the company and reassessing how best to accomplish them given the new capabilities which have surfaced. Perhaps “AI” is the best way. Or maybe simpler ways are better.

I’ve said it before, but as someone to whom “AI” means something more than making API calls to some SAAS, I look forward to the day they hire me at $300/hour to replace their “AI strategy” with something that can be run locally off of a consumer-grade GPU or cheaper.

Agreed. I think there is a FOMO phenomena among C-level execs, that is generating a gigantic waste os money and time, creating distractions around “AI strategy”.

It started a few years back and it is now really inflamed with LLM, because of the consumer level hype and general media reporting about it.

You can perceive that by the multiple AI startups capturing millions in VC capital for absolutely bogus value proposition. Bizarre!

The problem with your premise is that you're already drawing conclusions about the potential of AI and deciding it is hype. Perhaps decades ago someone could have equally criticised "Internet hype" and "mobile hype" and look foolish now.

Also decades ago someone criticised "bigdata hype" and "microservices hype" and looks right now. Doing things just out of FOMO is rarely a good business decision. It can pay out, even a broken clock is right twice a day, but it's definitely bad to follow every new thing just because Gartner mentioned it. I'm not giving advice of course, but having seen enterprises betting good money even on NFT I tend to treat every new enterprise powerpoint idea with a certain dose of skepticism.

Yes, hype exists and some things we thought were promising turned out not to be. However, if anyone is making the case that we know enough today to claim that AI is mostly hype, I think that's foolish.

Business can work on more than one thing at once. Businesses typically take any number of risks they invest in. Proper risk management ensures you've not over committed assets to the point of an unrecoverable loss.

Some businesses in some industries can follow a strategy of "never do anything until it's a well established process", others cannot.

Given the adoption of microservices and tech like kubernetes, I’d say you’re pretty wrong in judging that one.

> because, maybe they get a promotion?

While I agree with you in general, I don't think this bit is particularly fair. I'd say we know the limitations, and we also know that using LLMs might bring some advantage, and the companies that are able to use it properly will have a better position, so it makes sense to at least investigate the options.

> AI hype is really problematic in Enterprise.

This only appears so because we here have some insight into the domain. But there have always been hype cycles. We just didn't notice them so readily.

The speed with which this happens makes me suspect there is a hidden "generic hype army" that was already in place, presumably hyping the last thing, and ready to jump on this thing.

in consulting all we hear is sell sell sell AI so i'm sure my industry isn't helping at all. I'm not on board yet, I just don't see a use case in enterprise beyond learning a knowledge base to make a more conversational self-help search and things like that. It's great that it can help right a function in javascript but that's not a watershed moment... yet. Curious to see AI project sales at end of 2024 (everything in my biz is measured in units of $$).

In my case executives were more focussed on how it could be built into new projects, presales etc rather than internal efficiency improvements. A lot of people were amazed to see someone getting value out of it (efficiency gains) without building stuff around it. Blew my mind that this was the case.

Publicly listed companies whose traditional business model is under pressure are incentivized to hype because if they don’t inspire there idea of sustained growth to their wary investors, they cautionary tale in form of Twitter (valuation low enough to lose control) exists.

In Capitalism, you grow or you die and sometimes you need to bullshit people about growth potential to buy yourself time

Yes, sad but true.

This is exactly correct.

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