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.
Yuuup. To corroborate your story, my friend was making a pitch deck for her start up and AI isn’t particularly useful for her product. She wanted me to help her draft some copy as a favor and when I gave her an already rose colored write up, she insisted I mention AI.
I just added “AI powered” to a couple bullet points and called it a day, but she’ll be lying through her teeth to get those contacts. Ah, capitalism. -_-
AI is such a broad term that I’m sure they have something that qualifies.
Yeah, somewhere in the pipeline I think they even have NLP so that’s sorta right. Ain’t an LLM but certainly AI, lol.