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What are these businesses magically replacing their workforce with AI? I genuinely want to know. If it’s disrupting this much why hasn’t there been a jump in GDP?

Laying off support workers and replacing them with a chatbot doesn’t count.

chrisjj · 10h ago

> Laying off support workers and replacing them with a chatbot doesn’t count.

How so?

leakycap · 21h ago

I'm using AI effectively in situations that used to require expensive hardware, not people. But for every wise business owner there are many more who have no idea and put little thought into their choices.

amos-burton · 9h ago

this is a side effect that the society has got hyper efficient into delivering to the market. it is so fast that when things move, they swamp in and they might be crippled with bad decisions we figure out only too late.

flappyeagle · 21h ago

So about half don’t regret?

jsheard · 20h ago

About half don't currently regret it, but some of those may still regret it later when reality catches up with them. It takes time for a big organization to come to terms with making a huge misstep like that.

rsynnott · 12h ago

> however more than half (55%) of them are now admitted those redundancy decisions were wrong.

That's over half _admitting_. You can bet that the real figure is higher, because no-one really _wants_ to get up and say "as a CEO, I did an obviously stupid thing".

I'm actually a little surprised they get this high a level of admission of incompetence; when a company does something stupid, a fairly common response is to carefully pretend it didn't happen.

joeismailyan · 21h ago

AI is changing so rapidly right now, it's probably not a good idea to make one-way door decisions right now about it. I use AI everyday but it's more to augment work than replace it.

toomuchtodo · 21h ago

Bit of a delta with regards to leadership (perhaps, unrealistic, current state) expectations.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/19/nearly-half-of-ceos-believe-...

> Nearly half of CEOs — 49% — say AI could effectively replace “most,” or even “all,” of their own roles, and 47% say it might even be a good thing, according to a survey from online education platform edX. The poll, published on Tuesday, surveyed 1,600 full-time U.S. workers, including 800 C-suite executives and CEOs, as well as 800 non-executive workers.

jasonthorsness · 20h ago

Even in software development, which the models are better trained for than other domains and where results are easily verifiable by tests and compilers, I haven't heard of much outright replacement. Maybe the businesses that have tried it are fumbling anyway and that's why they jumped on an unproven idea.

I think at the end of the day there will be a tremendous skills amplification in many fields but the amount of work to be done will expand with the lowered cost and the amount of jobs will decrease less than the doomsayers are predicting.

KoolKat23 · 20h ago

Most are also using shit models, ancient by today's standards, with rigid and limited rag responses.

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Over half of UK businesses who replaced workers with AI regret their decision

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Ask HN: Is there a list of projects that will not adopt AI?