I once worked at a company that sold industry-specific core-business software to deep-pocketed corps who couldn’t / wouldn’t / shouldn’t roll their own. I got into a discuss with my manager about whether our products were essentially — my words — a hoax.

Me: “Look, our products are riddled with bugs and holes. They’re nearly impossible to deploy, manage, and maintain. They frequently don’t even work •at all• on the putative release date, and we sell the mop-up as expensive ‘consulting.’”

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“How can it not be a hoax?!”

He said something that completely changed how I look at the workings of business:

“Paul, you are making the mistake of comparing our software to your ideal of what it •should• be. That’s not what these companies are doing. They’re comparing it to what they already have now. And what they have now is •terrible•.”

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He continued: “They’re doing this with Excel spreadsheets, or ancient mainframes, or in many cases still using pen and paper processes [this was the early 00s], and those processes are just wildly labor-intensive and error-ridden. They lose unimaginable amounts of money to this. For them to pay us a measly few million to get software that takes 18 months to get deployed and just barely working? That is a •huge• improvement for them.”

In short: our product sucked, but it wasn’t a hoax.

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There’s a weird disconnect about gen AI between the MBA crowd and the tech crowd: either it’s the magical make-money sauce CEOs can just pour on everything, or it’s fake and it’s all a hoax.

A lot of that is just gullibility and hype at play, huge amounts of investor money and wishful thinking desperately hoping to find huge payoffs in whiz-bang tech.

But: companies do actually deploy gen AI, and it sucks, and they •don’t stop•. Why?!

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I suspect that conversation long ago might shed some light on how companies are actually viewing gen AI right now. Behind all the flashy “iT cOuLD bE sKYnEt” nonsense, there’s something much more disappointingly cynical but rational: Gen AI sucks. They know it sucks. But in some cases, in some situations, viewed through certain bottom-line lenses, it sucks slightly less.

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So Megacorp’s new AI customer support tool describes features that don’t exist, or tells people to eat nails and glue, or is just •wrong•.

Guess what? Their hapless, undertrained, poverty-wage, treated-like-dirt humans who used to handle all the support didn’t actually help people either. Megacorp demanded throughput so high and incentivized ticket closure so much that their support staff were already leading people on wild goose chases, cussing them out, and/or quitting on the spot.

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Gen AI doesn’t cuss people out, doesn’t quit on the spot, and has extremely high throughput. It leads people on wild goose chases •far• more efficiently than the humans. And hell, sometimes, just by dumb luck, it’s actually right! Like…maybe more than half the time!

When your previous baseline is the self-made nightmare of late stage capitalism tech support, that is •amazing•.

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