True story time. I was talking to a guy at $dayjob and he says he’s been talking with a third party company, whose solution we might buy. I asked him how the talks with them went and he said they were negotiating and I asked him how that was going.
He offhandedly said that he asked if and how they were using AI at all in their solution. I asked “Why did you ask about AI?”, since I was sort of curious what benefit he was looking for.
He said “Well, it’s not that I actually care about AI in their product, but if they don’t have any AI stuff, I can use that as leverage when negotiating the contract for a lower price.”
I was a bit astonished and he did kinda knowingly smile. He said “yea I know, I am part of the problem”. He also said “it’s also about taking a temperature on how ahead in technology the company is”.
I just wanted to share cause this is so insidious. Companies are asking each other about AI, despite the fact that (at least sometimes) nobody actually wants it! They are asking in order to use the lack of AI as leverage, which incentivizes companies to include AI in their offerings, not because it’s actually useful, but because it gives them leverage to raise prices!
This really makes AI seem more and more like a bubble.
My cousin is in college and apparently taking classes on AI. He’s trying to convince my uncle to let him program an AI agent for his company website so he won’t be “left behind.”
My uncle owns a gas station.
My local HVAC company has an “AI agent” answering the phones. It does not disclose that it is not a person. It was unable to complete the simple task of scheduling an appointment to have my HVAC system diagnosed. It refused to transfer me to a human who could. A human called me back later but I had already scheduled another company to come out.
I hope you were sympathetic but firm when you mentioned why – and suggested you’d try them again so they knew there was hope if they ditched the broken agent. Let’s leave people with some hope! :-D
I was not. I just told them I found another vendor. If they can’t put 2 and 2 together and figure out what happened, that’s on them. Not my problem.
How much is Ai coursework is barely concealed proselytizing? The Ai course the shop is pushing on us is a cheesy seminar that apparently plays like a timeshare pitch.
Oh, I’m certain all of it is. He thinks that because I guess he knows how to use AI that he’s going to be some big entrepreneur. After hearing him talk about it, I told him that there was no future in AI and he needs to learn to code.
Two weeks later, he texted me with a question about Javascript, so I’m hoping things are going better.