I found this company today https://www.usemotion.com/ai-employees/ai-sdr and they are selling AI employees. I understand the need to sell. But if you are selling tools as employees, then there is something that will break eventually. I agree with most of the sentiment, that don't try to invest thinking people will be replaced. Make your employees efficinet with tools.
There's a huge opportunity to pair this with gig workers to embody AI intelligence with human presence. Kind of like the LinkedIn version of Surroo[1].
of course it wasn't as big as this new AI push, but since the 80s AI over promised and under devlivered, it's not the fault of AI, but the greed of the business people.
This article's structure and wording feel like it was barely tweaked after coming out of ChatGPT.
Anyway, it misses one of the current biggest problems with all things AI in the workplace: It has attracted every resume-builder and ladder-climber who don't know what they're doing. They just want an AI initiative for their resume.
As long as it's not too public (like the Taco Bell AI drive through disaster) it doesn't really matter if it's successful or not. They can spin it as a success and the next company they apply to won't be able to check.
The same thing happened a few years ago when every PM and rising manager was looking for a way to put blockchain into products. Before that it was "big data", and so on.
IMO the step most of these projects fail on is UTILITY. I have yet to hear an AI project start with, "We need to do X and I think AI might help." Every single project meeting I've sat in started with an non-technical exec asking, "what can we use AI for?" They've got a solution and go looking for a problem so they can say they're using AI.
At my last company thankfully I was able to limit the losses to just under $450k which sounds like a lot, and it is, but it could have been about $5m/yr. I didn't sabotage anything, either. It was mostly through simply asking a lot of questions early, repeatedly suggesting we write plans down and make sure everyone on the project is up to day, and suggesting we test drive components before buying the whole car.
Spent a bunch of money, rolled out the pilot project to 70 folks, and began 30 day checkins. After 30 days we had a retention rate over 80%. By the 60 day mark, we were down to 40%. By day 90 we were at 22% and landed at 11% after 4 months and never went higher. By month 8 we cancelled the project and the 8 people still using the tool were ok letting it go, feeling it didn't help that much.
All because someone from the board said, "we need to use AI, anyone not using AI in a year will be out of business." The CEO asked what we should use it for, and the board member said, "I have no idea, that's your job. But we need AI somewhere. Look here, it can buy a plane ticket for me now!" and then wasted the next 40 minutes of the meeting talking about how amazing AI agents were. We're not a tech company, he was definitely NOT a tech person.
To me this is an indictment of the leadership style of the day of charging in, laying everyone off, then putting you on an AI death march project. That just destroys institutional knowledge, your credibility as a leader, while inevitably the project fails (and few on the team believed in it anyway).
Sure this type of leadership can work in limited short term circumstances where you have a very clear and meaningful objective. But if you can’t quickly get the team itself to believe in the project - and make it THEIR project not YOUR project - you’re going to fail.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 50.4 ms ] threadIf they did, they might have addressed many of the issues described in the report as the cause of the failures.
1. https://surroo.me/
https://www.geekwire.com/2015/amazon-makes-echos-alexa-avail...
of course it wasn't as big as this new AI push, but since the 80s AI over promised and under devlivered, it's not the fault of AI, but the greed of the business people.
Anyway, it misses one of the current biggest problems with all things AI in the workplace: It has attracted every resume-builder and ladder-climber who don't know what they're doing. They just want an AI initiative for their resume.
As long as it's not too public (like the Taco Bell AI drive through disaster) it doesn't really matter if it's successful or not. They can spin it as a success and the next company they apply to won't be able to check.
The same thing happened a few years ago when every PM and rising manager was looking for a way to put blockchain into products. Before that it was "big data", and so on.
> Before that it was "big data", and so on.
Cloud, micro services, NoSQL, serverless, …
We never learn :(
eugh, yeah that's definitely the case. I stopped reading once I got to the first repeated paragraph about data quality.
At my last company thankfully I was able to limit the losses to just under $450k which sounds like a lot, and it is, but it could have been about $5m/yr. I didn't sabotage anything, either. It was mostly through simply asking a lot of questions early, repeatedly suggesting we write plans down and make sure everyone on the project is up to day, and suggesting we test drive components before buying the whole car.
Spent a bunch of money, rolled out the pilot project to 70 folks, and began 30 day checkins. After 30 days we had a retention rate over 80%. By the 60 day mark, we were down to 40%. By day 90 we were at 22% and landed at 11% after 4 months and never went higher. By month 8 we cancelled the project and the 8 people still using the tool were ok letting it go, feeling it didn't help that much.
All because someone from the board said, "we need to use AI, anyone not using AI in a year will be out of business." The CEO asked what we should use it for, and the board member said, "I have no idea, that's your job. But we need AI somewhere. Look here, it can buy a plane ticket for me now!" and then wasted the next 40 minutes of the meeting talking about how amazing AI agents were. We're not a tech company, he was definitely NOT a tech person.
Sure this type of leadership can work in limited short term circumstances where you have a very clear and meaningful objective. But if you can’t quickly get the team itself to believe in the project - and make it THEIR project not YOUR project - you’re going to fail.
95% of Companies See 'Zero Return' on $30B Generative AI Spend - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44974104 - Aug 2025 (415 comments)
95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing – MIT report - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941118 - Aug 2025 (167 comments)