Several companies still have a call center. You might get a robot at the start, but that's usually to send you to the right specialist.

Automating data entry would be great. I myself would love that in my scientific job. It just seems like none of the agentic models are anywhere close to what's needed to deliver that.

I feel you, and AI tech has been completely squandered.

My phone knows everything about me and has for the last decade.

It is not able to do a single useful thing for me.

It knows where I go, when I go, what my schedule is, what I buy, what I don't.

It has never been able to suggest anything useful, advise me of a sale on products that I buy, let me know about a vendor in my area that can deliver for cheaper.

It's not able to notice that I'm trying to format text on my screen and I'm entering the same bullet at the front of things. It would never take over and say oh let me copy paste this very obvious task you're doing that even a child could deduce from your primitive actions.

"Transfer all of my image files off of my phone into a folder on my computer, then reorganize all of the photos on my phone into sensible groupings instead of random folders all over the place that have piled up over the years". Not going to happen, because that's useful.

"Hey phone, I'm going out. Take a look at my shopping lists and let me know what stores have what on sale so I can save a few bucks. You know all the stores I go to, because you're watching my every move." Not going to happen, because that's useful.

When AI is implemented into businesses, it's qualified to direct you to an FAQ. Any opportunity to win new customers with high level service is squandered.

I do not hate ai, I detest the fact that the possibilities to improve the lives of people have been completely ignored, while it is primarily implemented as a cost saving measure. Completely short-sighted and fucking useless.

That stood out to me too. This is effectively the investor class coercing use of AI, rather than how tech has worked in the past, driven by ground-up adoption.

It's not really their MO, the idea is that they invest in high risk startups in a trade of ownership. Startup's are already at high risk of failing.

The thing with private equity (VC is a subversion of PE) is that they do everything in their power to gain as much profit as possible. Most of the time in a short time span (1 to 5 years) and then sell the company or dividend out as much as they can. That's why some countries (like NL) have laws at how much you can dividend out btw, it is still easy to kill a company.

They will also not kill cash cows, aka companies/products/services that generate a nice amount of profit without doing much to generate that profit.

Using PE is can be a decent option, but treat it like crowdfunding financing. Promise them a certain ROI and give them a minority interest in the company structure (50% of shares mines a single share or less).

The idea of AI accounting is so fucking funny to me. The problem is right in the name. They account for stuff. Accountants account for where stuff came from and where stuff went.

Machine learning algorithms are black boxes that can't show their work. They can absolutely do things like detect fraud and waste by detecting abnormalities in the data, but they absolutely can't do things like prove an absence of fraud and waste.

They don't care about the long run.

Everybody wants interest on their savings or a return on the investment. This is pretty ingrained in society, and it forces banks to invest into companies which need to get a profit above what would be normally acceptable. Combine that with narcissist personalities and the Anglo-Saxon mindset, and you get companies that do everything for profit maximization.

Which in turn causes those companies to grow and buy out companies who do not share that sentiment, which will never grow massive.

It also doesn't help that we have been overpaying for things like hard- and software compared to the actual cost in the bookkeeping of these companies. A lot of personal time is often invested in startups that is excluded in the bookkeeping, which makes for higher profit margins. Plus, people go for the convents of things like Amazon even though it is often worse than local alternatives.

Shareholder value? Capital gains? Golden parachute? These are all great things if you belong to the owner class.

When VC and PE call a company or industry "mature" it means they don't see increasing revenue, only something to be sucked dry and sold for parts. To them, consistent revenue is worthless, it must be skyrocketing or nothing. If you want to see this in action right now, look what Broadcom is doing to VMWare. They also saw VMWare as a "mature company".