It seems like the article's unspoken consensus is if they hired people (ideally local) and paid them a living wage it would go back to working well enough like it did before they attempted the bot.
I wonder why no one brought that up as a solution?
I wonder why no one brought that up as a solution?
Lots of “thought leaders” who push the solution but will be gone for the consequences. Next folks (usually those who remain) clean up the mess to no fanfare.
That's funny because a few years ago it was the reverse. people were saying how big tech was bloated, caused by managers that felt their clout was proportional to how many people were under them.
Would an AI solution have been in place in this context if testing revealed this outcome we’ve arrived at and a data driven decision was made to hire instead? Or was no testing done and we’re testing in prod? Sure looks like testing in prod or simply ignoring metrics specific to a quality customer experience. Like investigating a crash site, we have to ask what series of events and decisions have led us to this incident.
There are a lot of businesses quietly and conservatively implementing AI and seeing real results - it's just the crazy Jerry Springer blowups you hear about!
I think the best experience I've had is when companies offer an MCP server that lets me get up and going with their product very quickly. Sequenzy is one such example I tried, very AI-first and works well with Codex.
If you're talking about stuff that isn't customer facing, there's all kinds of tasks that can and have been automated.
As a simple example, I run a retro games business and we've vibecoded up various controller/cartridge testing apps that have dropped the time it takes to test a box of product by around 50%. I'm planning to spin up a few Hermes agents soon to watch the prices of things and suggest improvements to our listings (e.g. noticing we haven't soldas many copies of Super Mario 64 as we should, and checking our keywords/pricing).
Obviously puts in big work with SaaS and stuff too.
EDIT: actually, Shopify's built-in agent works really well and is directly customer facing. It's a smart model (I think either a Kimi or Qwen as a base) that seems to have been fine tuned on their product itself.
You can ask it stuff like "what products have seen a decrease in sales" or "what is the value of my next payout" and it just answers them.
Before you had to manually write DB queries for this stuff, or more realistically just ignore it.
Any example of companies who reported a positive ROI thanks to AI?
Ooh! Ooh! I'm a local! I've used Kinney Drugs before.
They literally just can't find the work in the middle of nowhere (on top of not paying living wages). This region is a vast desert and we've lost every other major pharmacy.
"Living wage" up here is also kinda tricky because supposedly people seem to live just fine on minimum wage up here (provided you somehow had good enough credit to get housing in the first place). Things are /generally/ cheap, but there's still an unspoken "the boomers are just fine because they already own their house" up here.
We can't support a Walgreens, we can't support a CVS, we can barely support Walmart pharmacies. All you have for a choice up here is Kinney Drugs or Walmart Pharmacy.
And on top of that, as a former Kinney customer (pre-Burt): they really didn't do a good job in the first place. They suck.
I disagree that "AI" is the major issue on top of Kinney's problems, they've also recently transitioned to a "centralized filling" system in prior months that has caused quite frankly the largest amounts of frustration among customers. They continually fail to fill prescriptions that come into the local pharmacies, instead sending them out to central fill, and every time you show up at the pharmacy it's a "come back tomorrow" because it didn't come on the truck. At this point I don't even back down from that like the rest of the elderly customers, I perk up, tell them it's bullshit, they have stock, and suddenly the teenager punches a few buttons and go "we can have it ready in 20 minutes sir".
But yes, the Burt IVR bullshit is also equally bad and they really keep peddling it in the stores. I've wanted to punch the stupid cardboard standee in the face a couple times.