I'm an engineer in the oil and gas industry. Some of my job involves messy judgement calls that I would never involve LLMs in, but some of my job boils down to integrating different items of data that exist across documents, drawings and a few databases that are in different formats and don't cross reference each other. At times I have used LLMs as a kind of "highly enhanced search engine" to do semantic search across documentation of every different types. My alternative was opening each document and using ctrl+f, along with my intuition of knowing what document titles to search for.

For a more concrete example, I have an interface to the data that comes from every sensor on the oil processing facility. It has a built in "AI" (I try not to use that term!) but it has a feature where I ask how to process data in plain language and it'll give me the calculations, then it'll also provide a plain language summary of all the calculations I conducted. That saved me 10 hours of work.

I am a negative nancy on LLMs in general but I still passionately believe that they're a tool which every white collar employee will need to learn to use effectively.

I cringe when I hear engineers say "I didn't know the answer so I asked ChatGPT" but I also do worry that I could be significantly outperformed by another engineer with 10 years less experience in engineering and 1 year more experience in judicious use of LLMs.