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Comment by neepi | Hacker News Reader

One of my former contract outfits is there right now. Two failed projects so far, one of which impacted customers so badly that they ended up in trade press. The other one wrote off 5% of revenue with nothing to show.

No you can't solve everything with a chatbot because your CEO needs an AI proposition or he's going to look silly down the golf course with all the other CEOs that aren't talking about how theirs are failing...

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this does make sense, but there's infinite n ways to use AI on the workplace, i gotta wonder how much bad consultants trying to just sell services are to blame here. at least as much as the CEO's trying to shoehorn products nobody asked for i guess

Yes. They don't know what AI actually is and what the capabilities are and the companies selling integrations are running on hope rather than technical competence and suitability. So it gets applied to unsuitable problem domains and fails.

I hate consultants, their incentives are all whack from the beginning.

Hopefully more companies will encourage their own employees to explore how AI can fit on their current workflows or improve them and not try to hope for some magical thinking to solve their problems

I currently have to deal with such consultants. They want to sell their magical AI black box.

Speaking with the consultants let's me assume that they too get the pressure from the top to do ai stuff maybe because they fear that else they will be replaced by ai or so. It seems really somewhat desperate.

They vibe coded everything so it basically a second year cs student level of work and security.

I have seen no consultants directly selling this yet. To me it looks like this is all coming at the CEO "organically", or at least through the same channels that it's coming to the rest of us.

At my job it's been coming through the regular channels, but is empowered by aligning with current trends. It's easier to sell an AI project, even internally, when the whole world is talking about it.

right it feels like its more a pull than push, but what i meant is that any of the big consultancies are happy to take customers with -absurd- requests, and not finish the job, cause they paid regardless.

maybe they're not directly pushing AI (cause they dont need to), but they're happy to accept shitty jobs that make no sense just cause

> right it feels like its more a pull than push

I don't think that's the right distinction to draw here. It's definitely being pushed, just not by consultants.

> big consultancies are happy to take customers with -absurd- requests

This is of course always true. Consultants usually don't really care where they make the money, and long as you pay them, they'll find someone stupid enough to take on your task.

That's not what I'm seeing though. We're not hiring outside consultants to do big AI projects, we have people within our organization that have been convinced by the public marketing, and are pushing for these projects internally. I'm not seeing big consultancies accepting contracts, I'm seeing normal working people getting consultant brain and taking this as their chance to sell a "cutting edge" project that'll disrupt all those departments they don't understand what does.

greenfield projects have always been a way to be -seen- in big corps i guess.

AI is now the du jour's vector to get an easy YES from command.

Sad state of affairs i guess, at least put the effort to know wtf you want to build and more importantly WHY or HOW is it better than current solutions

How does that change compared to anything else consultancies are paid for?

They are roughly as bad as the "blockchain" consultants who want to install a blockchain to your company. The value is in the sale. This is why they have zero technical expertise.

It's a match made in heaven, with a buyer who just wants to report to the board that they have successfully invested in $fad, and a seller who knows the buyer is mostly motivated by the opportunity to put money towards $fad.

Ah, a monorail project.

(Simpsons kind, I don't know enough about civil engineering to comment on the real one).

Bad consultants exist to facilitate bad CEOs/CTOs.

"I have to do some __ / have a __ strategy / hire a Head Of __ or I look bad"

We are selling to willing buyers at the current fair market price.

To a degree, yes.

There are a lot of leaders who are looking for problems for their solutions.

edit: I say this as someone who has been stuck on top-down POCs which I late found out originated from "so my brother in law has this startup" where we got management questions that were mostly "so how could we use this here?" rather than "how is it performing / is it a good value / does it solve the problem we want it to solve".

Some tech cannot fail, it can only be failed.

You will never sell anything to any of those people ever again.

This is it! I'm telling you! This is it!

But that is spilt milk under the bridge.

Please, speak as you might to a young child, or a golden retriever.

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