I saw people complaining the companies are yet to find the next big thing with AI, but I am already seeing countless offer good solutions for almost every field imaginable. What is this thing the tech industry is waiting for and what are all these current products if not what they had in mind?
I am not great with understanding the business point of view of this situation and I have been out from the news for a long time, so I would really appreciate if someone could ELI5.
AI is being used to replace a lot of jobs, but companies usually do not want to advertise that.
There are possibilities of consumer products (e.g. smarter alexa and siri) but those are non monetized, so they cannot generate 100B revenue from it.
There is possibility of more innovative products e.g. smart christmas toy, but AI needs few more years to get there.
I would be careful with that statement.
I’ve been involved in some projects about “leveraging on data” to reduce maintenance costs. And a big pitfall is that you still someone to do the job. Great, now, you know that the “Primary pump” is about to break. You still need to send a tech to replace-it, and often you have to deal with a user who can’t afford to turn the system off until the repair is done, and the you can’t let someone work alone in the area. So you end-up having to send 2 persons asap to repair the “primary pump”.
It’s a bit better in term of planning/ressources than “Send 2 persons to diagnose what’s going wrong, get the part and do the repair”, which allows to replace engineer able to do a diagnostic by technicians able to execute a procedure (which is itself an issue as soon as you have to think out of the box). It allow to have a more dynamic “preventive maintenance planning”. So somehow, it helped cutting down the maintenance costs and improve system reliability. But in the end, you still need staff to do the repair. And I let alone, all the manpower needed to collect/process the data, hardware engineer looking on how to integrate sensor in the machines, data-engineer building a data-base able to use these data, data-scientists building efficient algorithm, product maintenance expert trying to make-sense of these data and so on.
I feel like, a big chunk of the AI will be similar, with some jobs being cut down (or less qualified) while tons of new jobs will take over
I’m not sure it’s going to be that. That was the model for the last wave of tech advancement layoffs and job replacements. This one is going to be so much dumber.
It’s no secret that most companies are stagnant or losing money right now across the board. For many reasons, disposable income is way down, COVID mentality change (people decided they wanted to live instead of just consume), and products have just been getting worse. So, CEOs are using AI to replace jobs that AI cannot yet replace. It immediately makes their bottom line look better for investors while doing nothing useful. This will bite them in the ass soon but they’ll say AI was oversold and it’s not their fault. Meanwhile, they look like the nothing they’re doing to improve their company is working and will survive another day.