The best theory of elusive enterprise AI ROI yet: AI makes workers more productive, not organization:
“How can you reconcile the failure of AI in the enterprise with the individual claims of skilled technologists who insist that AI is helping them do great work?” The answer is that these AI users are “centaurs” — experienced workers who are assisted by automation on terms that they set for themselves.
Thanks to their skill and experience, these workers possess discernment, the ability to tell good code from bad, and (more importantly) good uses of code-generation tools from bad. They demonstrate the adage that worker-driven automation improves quality, while capital-driven automation improves throughput
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Rather, an automation tool that requires the continuous and conscientious exercise of discernment will let individual practitioners improve their work in extremely satisfying and useful ways. It’s a way to spend more on operations in order to produce better outputs. It’s not a way to cut your workforce, realize a gigantic savings, and still produce comparable goods and services at a far lower cost.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to throw a money-wrench into the gears of AI, many easy options are available, mostly in the games industry. As ever, doing so exactly what you are asked works well for resetting dumb management expectations:
When they’re forced to use the technology, they engage in ‘malicious compliance’, where they use AI exactly as it has been requested by management, and will submit the results directly and unedited, including every inaccuracy and inconsistency. When management points out these issues–which can be serious when it comes to things like incident reports– “we point out that we did exactly what was asked of us, and they get real quiet.”
Related: AI will make your good organization gooder, and your bad organization badde.
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