Businesses Wasting Money on Trendy AI
Businesses are chasing trendy AI tools like chatbots and automations without understanding the core, simpler value proposition. This leads to misaligned investments and a failure to realize the true potential of AI. The focus is on the 'shiny object' rather than fundamental business needs.
SOURCES (60)
“Well right off the bat, new hire. I was equipped to rebuild some data dashboard our company pays 100k a yr for. I’ve done it before pre ai and it took me about a year while juggling other projects. I been working here for way…”
“AI is the automated equivalent of the dime a dozen contractors who pass around the same copy/paste solutions. In that regard it's not really an improvement or downgrade... it's just equally whelming. The real problem is most companies don't need an army of contractors - they need a core of strong engineers, and AI isn't that and will never be that.”
“Hello. I am a NG graduate in MS. Supply chain in Penn State. At this moment, I am working as a Supply Chain Operation role in a start up company. I have discussed with the AI engineers within our company, who is responsible for digitalization of the process and trying to transform entire company’s process to AI. He holds a quite aggressive attitudes regarding AI substitution towards the traditional supply chain jobs. He said that “AI would replace all the traditional office jobs like operations”
“There are things that AI can do very well and that are helpful but it should not be prescribing medicine”
“It seems to me that the US AI industry has bet the farm on the idea that AI will enhance AI itself, so any small advantage will magnify recursively into an unstoppable advantage. Therefore it is vital that they spend as much as is necessary to be the first to that small advantage.At the moment, I can't say that I see this happening. It's hard to know whether it may happen in the future.From what I see it seems like we're hitting the top of a sigmoid curve in the model's utility for coding assist”
“To be fair, I think many people and companies echo your original sentiment. The thing that’s scary about co-pilot as an example is it adopting the users permissions. And most users are over provisioned. The challenge for many companies is that they’ve spent so many years focusing on the perimeter, then the endpoint, then the cloud, but they never got a handle on the data itself. For companies to adopt and unlock AI in meaningful ways they HAVE to deeply understand their data. What it is, where i”
“give a thousand monkeys a thousand hammers and eventually 1 will be successful in achievign a target ("see AI works")”
“AI helps the less knowledgeable and capable to appear smart and competent; and enables the truly capable to be more efficient. The problem is (like most other advance technology) that too many of the first category think that AI will miraculously turn them into the latter. Its like a high tech fasters (and safer) car...just because you own one doesn't mean all of a sudden you've become a world class driver. If anything, the sense of confidence will make it more likely that when you inevi”
“My company has been in re-org mode since early May. Pretty much every announcement, including layoffs, and what increasingly sounds like preparations for a RTO, have been justified by "thanks to AI" or "to be competitive against AI-native orgs." Pretty much nothing makes sense. For instance, this company is leaving most of EU in favor of countries with fewer worker protection, but internal communication has it that it's (somehow) because of AI. Seen from the trenches, it”
“Come on, who's making ridiculous claims here?"I'll eat my hat". No, you won't."I'll give you a million dollars." Sir, you likely don't have a million dollars to just give away like that. And even if you had, you wouldn't do it.So, one of us is making actual, true claims based on years of hard work. You may consider them grandiose -- and you're entitled to your opinion -- but I can back it up with actual actions. Your claims are... well, just false.Here is "someone credible" mentioning Safecloud”
“> Having not lived through this, I'm actually curious as to how similar it was to the current hype cycle. Was there a general sense that something singularity-like was approaching?A singularity? No.One of the early driving obsessions was a coalition dethroning Microsoft (which both did and didn't happen). A battle over closed-vs-open. That story was everywhere.The main thing I notice is that there's a bit of a difference in the way value is created. Even in the UK the arrival of the web created”
“It was the same thing with blockchain, who here remembers the peak delusion of IoT + smart contracts replacing human judicial systems and crypto making central banks useless?LLMs are of course a form of progress, the same way blockchain was, but it has been baffling and cringy nonetheless to see people with a strong technical background pretending that at some point in the future the development of complex applications was going to be reduced to a few prompt lines written in English.Once the AI”
“Instead of just documenting the inevitable crash, you can actually give the CEO what they want safely. Route their AI tools (like Claude or Cursor) through a local zero-trust MCP bridge. It intercepts the AI's requests and strips PII before the data ever leaves your network. I open-sourced the architecture for it here if you want to test it: https://github.com/Maha-Strategies/maha-mcp-bridge”
“The entire industry threw a decade of zero-trust architecture out the window the second ChatGPT launched because executives got FOMO. The fundamental flaw right now is the architecture itself: people are taking proprietary, sensitive databases and dumping them out to the LLM's cloud just to give the agent context. It is a massive data exfiltration pipeline by design. The only way to actually reconcile AI adoption with InfoSec is to invert the data flow. You don't send the data to the mod”
“Well, AI can interpolate between A and B. Leaders (should) think outside of that space.”
“The biggest challenge is that people are 'relying' on AI, I have seen folks who would generate a 10 page document, read it for just 30 seconds... See that the english and grammar looks good and send it across... They do not even care to read it, while their job was to draft it.... Our AI product got a massive backlash, just because it asked too many questions from the lawyers (each one of them confided that the questions were legitimate), yet they needed a fire and forget product, withou”
“Yes, our leadership does not plan on hiring any new PMs. Our entire org has been using AI across all disciplines for 3-6 months now depending on the person. AI won’t eliminate program or project management but it is definitely changing the game in transformational ways. My advice is you just have to start running lots of experiments. When something doesn’t work think through and ask it why it didn’t get the results you expected. My experience so far is that is that the limiting factor for AI in”
“I read the entire post, and I think this company has no expertise at all. So I'd rather they just used AI writing instead.At least Frontier model AI doesn't make such overblown claims.They proudly claim that every AI project they've observed over the past year and a half had a 0% success rate, and that they've rejected all AI implementation work. While this is evidence that the market is crazy, at its core, it's a painful confession that they have no engineering expertise to implement and contro”
“It's actually worse than that. A significant number of these AI people are actual true believers who see it as their literal moral obligation to bring the machine God into being.”
“> And who hasn't seen productivity gains from more established AI technologyYou have to be very careful about claiming productivity gains. There may have been some instances of gains in a specific part of a workflow but does it slow down others or result in overall gains is yet to be empirically measured and validated. We’re seeing metrics like more lines of code, better unit tests, documentation, faster PRs etc. but the actual gains of businesses are still a question mark. Do more PRs lead to f”
“Using AI, any model, for ANY task outside of documenting, organizing, and validating your work is a clear sign to me that someone doesn't see or use AI for what it is. You're asking it a tech support question, and it's going to treat you like a moron almost every time. It's also going to use COUNTLESS references to the most common related solution unless you detail exactly why you're asking and what your situation is. I'm the engineer in all of my workflows involving agen”
“I’ve been reading a lot of posts here, and while I don’t really care for AI, I’ve accepted it as a tool. What has me more concerned is that almost every post says offshoring is a bigger threat than AI. As someone who’s still in university, that’s pretty worrying. Is it really that bad? Is every entry-level accounting job basically being offshored to India? Should I change majors to logistics? submitted by /u/Alternative_Top981 [link] [comments]”
“Honestly the funniest thing is... West turned into Greedy AI Companies who are taking BILLIONS and are literally beaten by startups with a budget of a medium sized insurance company branch... West pulls 300 Trillions Billions USD. Chinese just take the lessons apply it train on Western Models and release it to the open. Never thought i would root for china... started at AI then at RAM and now Huawei GPUs.... and now Kimi K3 soon open weights.”
“I haven't found Fable to be that much better than Opus and it costs way more. I definitely have found AI to accelerate my output overall, but I don't see it replacing senior engineers in things like FW dev anytime soon.”
“We're trying to solve a problem around AI governance in larger organizations. One thing we've noticed is that employees increasingly use AI tools outside the approved stack (Perplexity, Notion AI, browser extensions, desktop apps, etc.), making it difficult to understand where company data is going or what models are being used. We built a small open-source experiment that routes AI traffic through a central LiteLLM Gateway to provide visibility into usage. I'm more interested in und”
“I spoke to a friend last week who just watched two people on their team get let go, after which the work quietly got redistributed to "AI-assisted workflows" instead of new hires. Not a dramatic mass layoff, just... two people, then a slightly heavier workload for everyone else, then nobody mentioned it again. Has anyone here actually seen this happen up close? Either to your own role or someone on your team? And genuinely curious: do you think this ends up being a temporary belt-tight”
“The economy and the hiring market started sucking about a year before LLMs even started writing code. You're allowed to believe that AI isn't magical, you know?”
“Hell, in today’s world of AI agents running everywhere including on both sides of talent acquisition, how hard would it be to just set up an AI agent to automate all of these simple tasks? Not doing so is really a sign of incompetence and not giving even the bare minimum of a shit.”
“Senior architect here. I'm not worried about AI taking my job, I'm worried about it driving me away from my job. I didn't go into this field for the money, and I sure as hell didn't to babysit and play PM to a swarm of agents all day. My PM doesn't have an original thought in his head anymore; day in and day out it's "I asked X" or "Y told me to" and it's been eroding his mental processing, comprehension, and critical thinking like early onset deme”
“I have 25 years in high level IT infra and sec, half of that time has been in consulting. You have no clue how fucking lazy most tech pros are just no clue what so ever.”
“I know this a hot take, but, hear me out. I see a significant amount of doom-posting on here from developers who are terrified that AI is about to take their jobs. however, the more I read these threads, the more I realized: your perception of model capabilities directly reflects your own capabilities. If your entire value as a developer is knowing syntax, writing boilerplate, and regurgitating things you memorized or copied from stack overflow, then yeah, you should be sweating. that doesn’t me”
“You’re right you didn’t say useless. I mentally lumped you in with all the other devs on here who hold up their cherry picked hallucination example and make grand dismissive claims about AI because you sound exactly the same. Zero chance of taking your job after trying Claude a handful of times? Seems like a bold statement. AI won’t take your job but less ego driven true engineers who are willing to learn how to use these tools will.”
“That's easy to do, and not something I was really doubting. But it's also expensive and not really something suggested on an enterprise level.”
“Some industries deal with very sensitive information and have extremely restrictive regulations on how that information is shared... most of which existed BEFORE Generative AI. It's so much more work to adapt corporate policies that have been set in stone for decades than it is to simply ban something those in charge don't fully understand.”
“If there’s anything completely obvious at this point is 1. It’s a tool, albeit a powerful one when used right. Arguably like going from manual tools to power tools The current technology is basically a prediction engine. I don’t mean that in a bad way but it’s unsurprising when LLM’s have been good and even exceptional at the same things and still quite bad at the same things Anyone else is surely blowing smoke up your ass, as evidence by time so far. You are going to get the best use of it by a”
Sorry, but there is a malevolent intention to replace people with Ai.
“Ban wave is just starting... You wait... Most companies will do the same... Shadow ai is leaking IP everywhere.”
“If you work with sensitive information it can be a nightmare especially in countries with data protection laws like GDPR etc. Where I work we're not allowed to use anything either to protect user information.”
“The key thing we are not ready for is when shit hits the fan who will be blamed? I see in the future there will be court cases about this.”
“my team hired 3 new people but now the manager has trouble actually finding work for them. Its plain to see its actually a net drag since the work that would be driven via AI by a single person has to be split now to give them something to do.. I do hate saying this but its the truth”
“Feels like this is the year for LLM boosters to either put up or shut up, so to speak. Entire industry is now trying to do the exact thing a bunch of more cautious business leaders insisted they weren't doing: freezing hiring in full, especially for entry-level SWEs, and trying to rely on AI to cover the gap, as you've said. If things end up becoming more expensive via token pricing (which is absolutely increasing because these companies need to eventually turn a profit somehow and I do”
“Your trust of AI is your current understanding / belief /cognitive bias. Reasoning is real and is here. AI is not just inferring the web. The latest models support reasoning with evidence. Example: Performance of a large language model on the reasoning tasks of a physician “In all experiments, the LLM outperformed physician baselines and displayed continued improvement from prior generations of AI clinical decision support. Our study suggests that LLMs have eclipsed most benchmarks of clinical r”
“If it's any consolation, I suspect people worrying about job loses and a loss of meaning will soon realise these are minor concerns.What people always struggle to model with AI are the step functions that occur in capabilities as new algorithmic advancements are made. Historically those come maybe every ~5-10 years, although the pace has dramatically increase in the last decade and last 5 years.Most people right now are plotting a linear improvement over the several years as models get bigger, h”
“> you can use their LLM to trivially clone their software.Perhaps, but what you can't clone is familiarity, polish, integration, and network effects. These companies desperately need a moat, and so for example all the new additions to Claude's web interface are becoming the products that the vast majority of people will use and be locked into (if it goes according to their plan).”
“A few months ago we started looking at enterprise AI because the workload kept growing and the team was already stretched. The pitch sounded great. Faster work , lower costs, better service the usual stuff. Now I’m trying to figure out what actually holds up once it goes live. Has anyone here seen measurable ROI from enterprise AI? submitted by /u/Agreeable_Bill_8773 [link] [comments]”
“they say they’re trying to “make use of current AI with our current headcount“ before considering relieving head count and yet the reality we are already limited in labor but high in scope and ownership creating SPOFs everywhere. are your companies going this direction and has this gone well submitted by /u/Junior_Light2885 [link] [comments]”
“No, you missed the point. The GP was talking about causes for the situation where people are apparently prone to "outsourcing their thinking", resulting in low-effort AI slop being produced by entities that really should know better. The style of management I describe destroys the employee's confidence and agency, so they are much more likely to just submit and blindly accept whatever management/AI/etc. tells them than to do any sort of critical thinking.”
“A founder spoke about this at our recent AI summit, and wanted to share here to get other industry folks' thoughts. He built an AI chatbot for frontline manager training which was meant to help new managers practice the hard stuff like budget conversations, hiring decisions, difficult 1:1s so they could better manager their teams. But when he read through the anonymized transcripts of what people were asking it, it turned out most of them weren't rehearsing conversations with their teams”
“Maybe you think this is a witty comment, but ironically it illustrates exactly the problem with outsourcing your thinking to a machine. All they needed to do was raise the instance limit, which they immediately did when they saw the surge of traffic.No expensive tokens needed, no agents needed, no outsourcing their work to some calculator. The problem was solved even faster than an LLM would have, and they maintained full control and understanding of their systems while solving the problem. I”
“AI has a corrosive effect on everything it touches. I go to work and notice that everyone else is on a path to mentally checking out. Nobody values anyone's time anymore, nobody seems to weigh the cost of maintenance or conceptual work given creation is seemingly free. People get used to taking shortcuts, both for their work and also in their thinking.I feel like the only sane person left in my team, like everyone else has stopped giving a shit, pretending to get work done at insane velocity on”
“Is just wild to me people thinking ai is tulip fever or a massive bubble when every part of my life ai is entering. Even these forums 35 percent of posts are ai or vibe code related. At work (medical field) ai is replacing scribes and it can read an ecg better than your average doc. TSMC and chip companies are using in their pipelines. Pharm and bio companies are using. Archeologists are using to decode scrolls and find new petroglyphs. Education and tutoring will never be the same ... kids got”