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toenail
Makes sense, current llms seem to be at a similar level considering quality and supervision.
pydry
Im skeptical it's even replacing those.
hunglee2
In hindsight, remote working is an obvious stepping stone to offshoring, which itself is an inevitable milestone toward full automation. It is the work we do in in-person collaboration which will keep the moat high against AI disintermediation.
DonnyV
H1Bs are replacing workers.
peterldowns
“AI reshoring” is what I call it. Makes perfect sense.
candiddevmike
> Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return.

Oof

jcfrei
IMHO this is going to be part of a broader trend where advancements in AI and robotics nullify any comparative advantages low wage countries had.
mickeyp
That has long been my personal theory as well, though I never had a way of firmly backing it up with evidence, though this article hardly does that either.

But it does make sense on a superficial level at least: why pay a six-pack of nobodies half-way 'round the world to.. use AI tools on your behalf? Just hire a mid/senior developer locally and have them do it.

api
This makes a ton of sense. The interaction is similar: write specs, give orders, wait, review and fix results.
notyourwork
I can see this. We employ a lot of off shore for what we call support engineering. Things like jdk upgrades or cert updates. It’s grunt work that lets higher paid engineers utilize their time on business value work. As AI continues to grow in scope, it will surely commandeer much of this. Employing a human is more expensive when compared to compute for these tasks at a certain scale.
jmyeet
AI is going to force the issue of having to deal with the inequity in our economic system. And my belief is that this confrontation will be violent and many people are going to die.

The fundamental issue is wealth inequality. The ultimate forms of wealth redistribution are war and revolution. I personally believe we are already beyond the point where electoral politics can solve this issue and a violent resolution is inevitable.

The issue is that there are a handful of people who are incredibly wealthy and are only getting wealthier. The majority of the population is struggling to survive and only getting poorer.

AI and automation will be used to further displace working people to eke out a tiny percentage increase in profits, which will furhter this inequality as people can no longer afford to live. Plus those still working will have their wages suppressed.

Offshored work originally dsiplaced local workers and created a bunch of problems. AI and automation is a rising tide at this point. Many in tech considered themselves immune to such trends, being highly technical and educated professionals. Those people are in for a very rude shock and it'll happen sooner than they think.

Our politics is divided by those who want to blame marginalized groups (eg immigrants, trans people, "woke" liberals) for declining material conditions (and thus we get Brownshirts and concentration camps) and the other side who wants to defend the neoliberal status quo in the name of institutional norms.

It's about economics, material conditions and, dare I say it, the workers relationship to the means of production.

alephnerd
Yep! The low value outsourcing firms like Indian WITCH companies have been heavily leveraging LLMs and laying off employees as a result.

High value product work remains safe from AI automation for now, but it was also safe from offshoring so long as domestic capacity existed.

musesum
So, aside from trust the biggest barrier is lack of adaptability?
donperignon
Yes, I agree. And it is not that AI is any good, but those outsourcing shops are most of the time not adding any value, all the contrary takes time to babysit them. Some of this even look like an elaborate scam, someone in the organization launder money through this companies somehow, otherwise I don’t understand how they are useful. Obviously there some good ones, but in my experience is not the norm.
keybored
Pretend for a moment that capital investors do any work. Can AI replace that work?
bilater
The Indian IT sector is almost certainly going to be decimated (at least in its current form), and we haven’t really wrapped our heads around what that means for the world’s fourth-largest economy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK-gnW3f-q0

hereme888
AI is already so much better than 99% of customer support employees.

It also improves brand reputation by actually paying attention to what customers are saying and responding in a timely manner, with expert-level knowledge, unlike typical customer service reps.

I've used LLMs to help me fix Windows issues using pretty advanced methods, that MS employees would have just told me to either re-install Windows or send them the laptop and pay $hundreds.

torginus
I wonder if AI automation will even lead to a recession in total software engineering revenue.

At my job, thanks to AI, we managed to rewrite one of our boxed vendor tools we were dissatisfied with, to an in-house solution.

I'm sure the company we were ordering from misses the revenue. The SaaS industry is full of products whose value proposition is 'it's cheaper to buy the product from us than hire a guy who handles it in house'