this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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saying the quiet part out loud... big tech won't like that.
I've found like, 4 tasks that are really helped with by AI, and I don't have the faintest idea how you could monetize any of them beyond "Subscribe to chatgpt"
At my previous job their was a role where you just called insurance companies and asked them incredibly basic questions about what they planned to do for a patient with diagnosis X and plan Y. This information should be searchable in a document with a single correct answer, but insurance companies are too scummy for that to be reliable.
In 2021 we started using a robot that sounded like a human to call instead. It could handle the ~80%+ of calls that don't use any critical thinking. At a guess, that's maybe 5-10% of our division's workforce that wasn't needed anymore.
With the amount of jobs like this that are 100% bullshit, I'm sure there are plenty of other cases where businesses can save money by buying an automated bullshit generator, instead of hiring a breathing bullshit generator.
The problem is that 20% failure rate has no validation and you are 100% liable for the failures of an AI you're using as a customer support agent, which can end up costing you a ton and killing your reputation. The unfixable problem is that an AI solution takes a ton of effort to validate, way more than just double checking a human answer.
I feel like customer support is one place where AI may actually be used going forward because companies don't really care if their customers get support. The only wrinkle is that if companies get held to promises the AI makes (there's that Canada Air incident from last year where the AI offered a refund and the company tried to walk it back).
I've had this discussion come up in meetings recently.
CustomGPT is like $500/month for 5000 queries.... that limitation and price (if you have a reasonable amount of customers), kind of just means you are better off hiring one employee. I'm not going to ping them for pricing for their enterprise plan beyond that, as going to cost an employee anyways.