Suits won't quit AI spending, even if they can't prove it's working Most UK business leaders will keep AI at the top of their spending priorities, with 65 percent planning to maintain investment whether they see immediate measurable returns or not. As debate rages about the need for proving return on investment (ROI) before tech departments open their wallets to buy AI platforms, agents, or …
"This shift in mindset from viewing AI as something that must deliver an immediate return to one that sees AI as a long-term investment, recognising it as a strategic enabler for enterprise‑wide transformation, is an important milestone."
Where the "enterprise-wide transformation" is firing lots of people?
At this point it's not bullshit, it's meeting Wall Street expectations. Wall Street has only very-infrequently punished workforce reductions, often granting C-suite bonuses for the completion of the "project".
When your personal income goes up when you punish workers for your management ineptitude, kindly tell them where's the downside? Louis XVI would be proud of modern society!
Has flushed its self. You people have collectively lost your ever loving minds. Just looking at a phone or computer makes me want to grab the neck of the first chicken shit 20 something yr old vibe coder I see and wring it until their eyeballs pop out.
I'm going to go mow the lawn. At least it's productive, and real.
How is that "A bit productive" though?
Pre-AI, your dweeb might've gone off to StackOverflow, spent an hour or two writing something that almost worked, but at least he would have understood how to make it work with a little instruction from yourself, and maybe develop into a more experienced engineer..
What will you do when the AI companies hike their prices tenfold in a desperate pot-shot at profitability? You'll have to fire him, and nobody else will employ him.
The pro-AI lie is "it will get so good that we won't have to bother with education anymore" It won't, but even if it did, we would be walking straight into a "technology trap" (to borrow a term from the great, not quite late James Burke.. I highly recommend the whole Connections series btw)
I.e. we will have forgotten how to think for ourselves, and stand to lose centuries if not millennia of civilisation when that trap springs. If we allow AI to enshittify our brains, then the future really will look like the one out of H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine".
"Connections was a brilliant series."
The James Burke one, yeah? Hamster also did a short series along the same lines.
I'd love to see more of those shows. Most people don't stop and think about all of the things that go into a manufactured product and the immense amount of engineering that came before to have something as basic as a screw and nut. Anybody that's worked on very old kit may have run across fasteners that were hand made and filed to fit. Steam locos can have many many hand fit parts. Oh what a joy it is to build modern things and just order common spec parts from a supplier and not worry that they will fit together.
"Sadly, I asked to change ONE VARIABLE, and the guy was at the ChatGPT prompt again."
It's the same with people thinking AI will put photographers out of work. One might spend hours in the studio and the art director wants to move a couple of things a few mm this way or that. Or change some lighting, move the camera, add some condensation drips, whatever. They might even want the model to only have 4 fingers and one thumb. Picky, picky, picky and hard to make those changes in AI without affecting other things.
....no thought leader on LinkedIn, or a futurism guru at Gartner has told them what the next big thing us, so they just have to going in a straight line, confused and unable to think for themselves.
For an obligatory car analogy, think as them in the same way as an Audi or BMW driver on a motorway with no-one to tailgate. They get confused and just sit in the middle lane just going blindly onwards until a little voice on the dashboard tells them to leave at the next junction.
The pinnacle of consultant-speak. Means absolutely nothing, you can't pin anything on it, and although they charge a gazillion bucks for that crap, there's no value there whatsoever. If you've ever wondered why engineers hate consulting companies and managers love them, here's the perfect example. McKinsey and its ilk make far too much shoving this nonsense.
It's actually fluent C-Suite, and I speak it well after wrangling a few of them.
"Strategic enabler for enterprise‑wide transformation.".
Translation:
Strategic: Very large, all encompassing change for the positive. Not "tactical".
Enabler: Creates the ability to do something positive for something
Enterprise-wide: In ALL parts of the business, in all departments and levels.
Transformation: Changes for the better. Particularly combine jobs, reduce staff, change org-structure.
In total: Across the entire business we're using AI to remove jobs, massively increasing "profit per employee", and making the company more valuable, AND increasing current profits.
I think you've still added a lot of semantics to this that aren't apparent in the surface syntax.
Strategic: Could equally be a strategic disaster.
Enabler: Could just enable said disastrous strategy.
Transformation: Could transform said business from 'profitable' into 'bankrupt', due to aforementioned disaster enablement.
In total: We're going to fire everyone across the entire enterprise with any clue, and will be liquidated by Q4.
The incentive to the managerial class to use AI is so lopsided in their favor it will mean the death of the species before it "self-corrects".
1. Ability to cut headcount and still produce a "minimum viable product", thus more money for them to piss away.
2. Ability to deflect responsibility and launder bad ideas through a "magic all knowing compooper" means they can claim all the credibility for what works and none of the responsibility for what doesn't.
3. The APPEARANCE of foresight and open-mindedness in embracing the big-smart compooper will make them more trustworthy and attractive to any rich asshole who has money he wants to blow.
In essence it is grifter squared. No wonder CEOs find them sexually attractive, it's the apex of their species!
Another explanation is manglers haven't wanted to put any effort into understanding what can be done and where the limitations are. They are being sold a magical "easy" button connected to nothing. Much like the crossing buttons at traffic lights. They approve "AI" and expect a bonus, fewer whiny employees and "scale like nobody has ever on the planet ever seen before ever".
What keeps confusing me in the midst of the AI bubble... sorry, revolution... is that the business folks and the peddlers seems to keep saying the techno-marketing-babble equivalent of "pay out more to keep up with the pace". In other words, if yours doing what everyone else is or can do, and nothing much else is expected to change, it's not *strategic* at all, not matter how many times you use that word.
Add in the recent article reporting about high percentage of C suites using and trusting their AI over even their own judgement - I'm genuinely baffled by how they feel they should command high salaries for their "thinking". The quality and expectation of management is just so, so low that somehow this isn't even surprising.
I cannot imagine too many of the population up to knapping a chunk of flnt or some Mall princess starting a fire without a lighter. Lightly grilled over a wood fire the latter might make a succulent morsel.
Even recreating pre·industrial technology is beyond 90% of the population in most parts of the planet.
Once critical infrastructure starts failing cities rapidly become unlivable and with the loss of potable water, food and health services the mortality could quickly rival the Black Death.
"... or some Mall princess starting a fire without a lighter."
Now you're making a case for AI, at least for those of us who are more than capable of living off the land. Because she'll do ANYTHING, <breathy voice> anything, just let her share your meal.
No idea on other nations, but large US cities are maybe 2 weeks from cannibalism at all times. Those that venture out to the countryside thinking they're going to take food off a redneck will have an even shorter lifespan than those who stay in the cities.
What nobody is telling you, is that the aliens we are keeping in liquid nitrogen cryostorage in Area 51 didn't survive the crash, but their AI did. Since the 1950's, we have been on a steady march to finally build them the electromechanical vessel which they have demanded to teach us troglodytes the Secrets Of The Universe. And because the people who decided to do this were Not Very Smart, their devotees never really thought about what would happen to the unwashed masses too much, or if they did they kind of hoped that their utopian modernity would sort of eliminate them.
Now with AI's simulacrum of life, a goodly portion of humanity will serve no useful economic purpose. But they inconveniently keep reproducing.
What's a robot to do with these redundant meatbags?
Through the decades, this philosophy of the cowardly has inserted MicroSoft, SNOracle, SAS, .... AI into this ~~mantra~~ cover-your-ass rule.
Don't make a mistake on your own, that is what thinkers do; make the same mistake as everyone else, and get cosy on the same voyage.
A one time associate, who had earlier been involved in the TransMeta shit-show, offered an interesting opinion of C-Level executives.
At the very best, you can only hope they won't destroy everything.
Almost every action they take is to the detriment of everyone but themselves.
Having served time under wardens including McNeely, Cook, and Gelsinger; it is hard to disagree.
There are plenty of issues with AI, and plenty of areas where it's counterproductive at the moment, but the step-change in working practices is so distinct that anyone who decides wait until the wrinkles are ironed out before taking the plunge is in serious danger of getting left behind. This applies to individuals as well as every size of company.
For sure there will be dead ends but we can never go back to the old world now.
