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Comment by acivitillo | Hacker News Reader

$80 per month in a 5,000 people Enterprise is 400k per month which translates to ~5m per year. That is easily in the 8-16% of their total IT budget. I don’t know you, but companies don’t like to increase recurring cost. Is AI good? Yes. Is it clear how it generates enough ROI to justify a material IT cost increase? No. This is the problem now, not how much white collar workers use AI, but what is the productivity narrative of it. Because AI is so generic, there is no clear specialized use case, like when Salesforce invented the CRM for example.

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> when Salesforce invented the CRM for example

Huh? If that was not a joke, here is the history of CRM:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_relationship_manageme...

> Using it, people that FDR met were impressed by his "recall" of facts about their family and what they were doing professionally and politically.

Hmm. Today that'd be creepy.

> Is it clear how it generates enough ROI to justify a material IT cost increase?

It's probably crystal clear for the people making those decisions.

There is also a very clear specialized use case, which is translation.

The thing that's a bit different about AI from a CRM is it translates pretty directly into time savings. You only need each employee to save 1-2 hours of work per month to break even with a $80/seat subscription.

It's true that it can easily save 1-2 hours per month, but it only seems worth it if those hours saved are spent doing something else productive/profitable.

It appears that a lot of the time saved is spent either 1) doing nothing instead, 2) waiting for the AI to finish, or 3) increasing the hours spent elsewhere down/up the chain for reviewing, fixing, auditing.

The obvious benefit of anything offering to save time is that now you have time for "higher order work", but often, we use the time saved to be lazy.

After all, that's the underlying reason we used the time-saving, corner-cutting tool in the first place.

People will pay out of their pockets if an AI can free up a few of their hybrid hours a month. And already it looks like the vast majority of white collar AI spend is from individuals, not companies.

I mean, why would you show your hand by using the company AI? Use your AI and take the credit...

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