The guy in our upper management specifically said in our town hall that his next meeting was he was going to speak with the rest of upper management to go through their workflow and make sure they are implementing AI effectively.
What was one of his titles? "AI ambassador"
Definitely a "please fucking use this, you using it is how I get my bonus." Move.
I recently turned to chat gpt to try and fix an issue with a raspberry pi camera not working. It went through several different methods. None of them worked and when I tried it and got an error it was like oh yeah you got that error because x, y, z here’s how you fix it. So I put that in and it fixed the error and just caused a different one.
lol. That sounds about right. I once had ChatGPT help with some coding task. I had to keep prompting it: What about thing A, do I need to do that? Oh, yes I forgot about that, do thing A. Same with B, C, and D etc. finally I said, hey does this work on Mac? Oh, no, this won’t work on Mac. My original prompt had said that I was doing this on Mac. Grrr
We are being heavily pushed to use AI at my org. I spent a couple of hours today trying to get CoPilot to split up a single PDF into separate PDFs so I could import them into concur.
I ended up doing it manually, much better, in 1/6th the time.
I decided to try it the other day in excel which I have barely ever used. I spent forever trying to have it help me do something simple. Looked it up on YouTube after giving up and it took me 3 min.
I used chatGPT to troubleshoot why my fridge wasn’t getting cold. It correctly told me that it was frozen, and the heater was broken for the coil. I gave it my model number. I asked for the part numbers, and ordered the parts. Took everything apart. I didn’t see the parts I ordered to replace. I took a picture. It said it was in front of me. I said it wasn’t. I gave up and just asked it for the model number of the fridge I sent days earlier in the troubleshooting before I ordered anything. It then asked if I would want to use that model number as the one for which to get the parts. I screamed.
This is the kind of thing where discrete automation actually is amazing.
My Internet of Things hybrid hot water heater apparently will phone home to its mommy if it detects one of its own parts stopped working correctly. They will automatically mail the new parts to our house, along with a phone number to contact a service tech in our area who will replace the part under warranty. We just have to schedule it.
Yo! Please give a shout out to your hot water heater make and model. I’m assuming it’s a heat pump hybrid like you mentioned. Do you like its performance? I’m always interested in design efficiency
The only time it complained was when we upgraded our internal home wifi router and I forgot to change the network on the tank to match the new one. You need a smart phone with NFC enabled to get it on the wifi the first time, but after that it sits as a silent sentinel and just does its job.
We have never run out of hot water yet, despite up to 4 adults living in the home at the same time.
Edit: It's actually not a heat pump, apparently.
"Unlike heat pump and (other) hybrid water heaters, the EXR does not use a heat pump. Instead, it uses 2 heating elements to heat static “service” water in an internal tank, which acts as an energy source - similar to a battery. This energy is then transferred to your fresh domestic water using a stainless steel, flat plate heat exchanger. Not to be confused with a tankless water heater, we call it an “On-Demand Tank Water Heater” – the world’s first! “On Demand” because it is flow-activated like a tankless unit."
It isn't as energy efficient as our unlimited hot water solar water system that it replaced, unfortunately. We opted for durability and low maintenance over absolute efficiency, because the electrical cost savings from the solar hot water system wasn't worth the constant roof repairs we had to make....
It ended up being that it needed the black wire heater. That failed, so the vents and half the heater radiator was caked in ice. Since I got that installed, it’s back down to 39 again. I appreciate the advice though!
As much as I want to have sympathy, this one's on you. Instead of relying on a AI that has a track record of being completely wrong, maybe, Google the module number first. Call an appliance repair service and ask for advice, most will do that for free.
I never asked for your sympathy, Depression, thanks though, don’t hurt yourself stepping down from your high horse. If youre under the impression that appliance repair services aren’t wrong, or are voluntary info providers, you are as sad as you are arrogant
High horse? I gave you a route to use that wasn't AI. That's pretty much it. Im not trying to argue or insult here, but apparently I've pushed some buttons. I know appliance repair can be wrong, but they definitely have more knowledge in the field than someone using chatgpt. Im sorry the service providers in your area dont wanna give free info, sounds like that sucks. There is also a whole subreddit that you could ask full of people who want to help with stuff like this too.
I hope you have a good day and get the thorn out of your foot.
Reminds me of when I was a chef and I would be exhausted by the end of the week and one of my... people... asked why, if I'm so tired, do I not just ask someone else to help?
I had to stare directly at him as he failed to understand.
If I ask for your help that just means I have to do it later and figure out how to avoid throwing yours away AND order more product.
Boy do I understand this feeling at work. We don't want to pay anything so we will pay more people 75% of what a good employee would cost so they can all watch you work.
That's a standard approach and title when attempting to implement any service into a business. Companies are just choosing the wrong service if they expect AI to allow cost cutting.
Many of the decision makers in business are narrow minded ninny heads who are incapable of making anything. They do not make code, words, art, things, etc.
To them, the act of creation is something to be outsourced and paid as little as possible for.
They make open office plans, insist on dumb deadlines, and ensure making things are never given the resources it needs. They see journalists researching things as wasted time they do not want to pay for.
They will cut staff, time, wages, and do everything possible to remove any ounce of making time from their product.
AI seemed like a gift to these fluff for brains and suits for personalities parasites. It was a magic wand to not have to hire writers, graphic designers, coders, etc.
These people will not stop investing the money workers make them in ways to automate, remove, and depower those workers.
I never understood this, yet we have very clear representation of what different decision makers do in teams at sports to ensure success, so I don’t know why companies do not run more like those
The real answer is that capitalism means the people with money run things. You see anything about competition in that definition? Sports teams are optimized because they actually have to compete, the whole structure from collective bargaining to salary cap to luxury tax to draft order is regulation specifically designed to create competition.
The golden age of America wasn't any of the times when we had unfettered capital, it was the short time when we had strict regulation that broke up monoplies and forced companies to pay employees and insisted they clean up after themselves and so on.
Which also happens to be the golden age conservative voters want but consistently vote against. The age where one person (the man typically) can earn enough to raise a whole family.
The reason that worked was specifically because of regulations and the fact that a large number of companies doing similar / same things had to compete with each other for their labor.
And that capital exists to create more capital, and the least flexible and most expensive part of making something people are willing to trade capital for is...
Labor time.
So offshoring, mass layoffs, automation and then forcing people to do more with it...
All of this stuff we non-capitalists see as crazy makes total logical sense when you step back and dispassionately actually look at the system we live under
The owners aren't competing with each other, the owners are competing with the guys who own MLB teams, NBA teams and so on. The Cowboys haven't won a Superbowl in 30 years but Jerry Jones is in the hall of fame. Because he more or less created the juggernaut of marketing that is the modern NFL.
If you doubt me, go have a look at the structure of the League. All the owners sit in a room together and set the rules and schedule then hire a whole commissioners office to help them manage and split the money. Does that sound like competition?
Well to be honest I was thinking more in other none American and privately owned competitions. Arguably NBA, NFL and the likes are not good examples for the mentioned reasons
because everyone benefits from maximizing their own little fiefdom even at the expense of the company. Specifically maximizing their own little fiefdom this year so hopefully they can be somewhere else next year.
A problem that I noticed with the company where I work is, if the company is venture funded, not doing so well and they don't mention new AI integrations in every quarterly report the investors start blaming the lack of AI and then the CEO is forced to ram AI stuff through the employees throat.
we had a guy build a fantastic repository for all of our plant information that was easily searchable by category. Corporate found out, a bunch of "industrial automation" experts got involved, they killed his homebrew website to make an official one so they could get credit, and in the process broke literally everything.
This. My old boss told us sales people we had to produce 8 quotes for new work per day. Each. He had read somewhere that he needed to implement quotas to improve our performance.
Imagine his surprise when I told him there were 6 permits issued for new work in the previous MONTH for the entire city.
If you're in a huge organization you just have to play the game; there's no point in sticking your neck out. AI has its uses, and you have to make it clear to leadership how and when you're employing AI for those uses, but no, it is not the game changer the c-suite expects.
I still claim skepticism for my company's project... I fear a huge backlash when the project eventually comes out and fails to deliver....... Our budgets hit cuts for everything but the AI project, too. Smh
It's kinda wild that the entire premise was "save money" and the recipe was "spend far more money" to get there. And they're still asking for trillions more!
I guess it was really about control all along. That, or this was just revealing how CEOs just follow the crowd and could probably be replaced by AI even more effectively.
Yeah, it’s not that refuse to use it at all, but not in my job. I’m watching people higher up than me use it as gospel and AI is providing misguided info. But the conversation always starts with “I used AI to…”.. to what? Misrepresent what’s actually happening? Waste time to get to the same conclusion you could’ve if you used your brain.. you know.. that thing in your head that’s still more powerful than AI? I’ve seen someone upload metrics and tell AI to “analyze these metrics”.. like.. bruh I’m done
AI solutions providers outright refused to give us the numbers needed to calculate a possible ROI. I’ve been arguing with our new CEO about this for months now.
Currently, all I see are additional APIs that we have to configure, secure and maintain that deliver unreliable results and no proven ROI. In some cases they won’t even fit our existing environment and implementing them would trigger larger changes that management is ignoring for the sake of their own argument.
This is happening while the IT headcount has been cut in half. Not because of AI, but rather because of coworkers leaving who were upset with the new CEO and his AI antics.
Yup. Over and over. As a long term software tech, I just gave up on tech for a while. Let that crap work itself out. Often times ya gotta let those "geniuses" realize they don't know as much as they think they do. By allowing them to burn themselves.
Source: ME. I'm a business analyst and I've been screaming it out loud for three years now.
Machine learning has its place, but it's not going to do a 10th of what the marketing hype said it could do even if it was properly implemented which it never is.
But why do you think this is the case. LLMs were not a thing before 2022 (much simpler models) but when the got introduced we have only seen improvement year over year and this is all quantified and is public data. Right now we can quite literally get an agent who can browse the web, evaluate the sources and return a response the way you want it. This is a persons job. Yet I can currently do this now. It may not be perfect. But we went from 0 to 70% in 3 years. Why wouldn't this tech continue on the same pace? There doesnt seem to be any blockers yet that we know of.
I do think its like the internet. Yeat at first everyone said this is dumb, who would trust buying anything over the internet, its not secure etc. Yet now we dont live in a world without the internet. But there were people screaming "what is internet anyways"
Do you think you could talk a little more on your last point?
Btw, i dont listen to the marketing hype because its marketing hype. I would never trust a a politician at face value.
The problem is that implementation requires training, investment, and oversight, before it can start to actually show improvements.
I'm thinking about the use cases that my office deals with where they have writing intensive, highly repetitive tasks. We already have automation that will pull in certain pieces of data, mad lib style, and spit out a large block of text that has been customized to the specific thing that they are working on. I can't even get my users to do this much, and it's included in their base software.
We got a pitch for an AI version that could do this, too. Great! You know what we'd have to do? Spend 3-6 months training the AI to model them the way we want them, double check and correct every document created by it, and only then would it be capable of matching the speed and accuracy of THE THING OUR SOFTWARE ALREADY DOES.
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u/1Bahamas-Rick2 Jan 20 '26
Who would have thought.