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Comment by halayli | Hacker News Reader

The paper claims that 95% of companies see no AI revenue gains, which seems like an outrageous blanket statement. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle.

The real issue here is a fundamental statistical and categorical error: the paper lumps all industries, company sizes, and maturity levels under the single umbrella of "companies" and applies one 95% figure across the board. This is misleading and potentially produces false conclusions.

How can anyone take this paper seriously when it makes such a basic mistake? Different industries have vastly different AI adoption curves, infrastructure requirements, and implementation timelines.

It's equally concerning that journalists are reporting on this without recognizing or questioning this methodological flaw.

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I think what we're seeing, and what the article describes, are company leaders across industries reacting to the AI hype by saying "we need AI too!" not because they've identified a specific problem it can solve, but because they want to appear innovative or cut labor costs.

Right now, the market values saying you're doing AI more than actually delivering meaningful results.

Most leaders don't seem to view AI as a practical tool to improve a process, but as a marketing asset. And let’s be honest: we're not talking about the broad field of machine learning here, but mostly about integrating LLMs in some form.

So coming back to the revenue claims: Greenhouse (the job application platform) for example now has a button to improve your interview summary. Is it useful? Maybe. Will it drastically increase revenue? Probably not. Does it raise costs? Yes; because behind the scenes they’re likely paying OpenAI processing fees for each request.

This is emblematic of most AI integrations I've seen: minor customer benefits paired with higher operational costs.

The Greenhouse example is so crazy - with no additional context about the interview, what possible value could an AI add to a summary of a real event that happened?

It's just an additional button in their WYSIWYG editor. I'm sure its not much more than a simple prompt telling ChatGPT or whatever to clean up the text for clarity.

That's exactly it. We are using AI to reformat all of our documentation... And they we've been told to review the output. No one asked for this, there are no benefits, and it's adding completely unneeded extra work.

Would you feel the same way if they'd hired a human technical writer to generate documentation and you had to review the output?

Yes, because our documentation is fine. No one thinks any changes need to be made. Leadership is realizing all their AI hype has no benefit to anything we do so they're scrambling to find projects to use it for.

It's not clear to me how much companies are even attempting to quantify the value of 'AI'. Having 'AI' is the value. It's similar to the Data Science / Machine Learning craze where managers decided that we must have ML, instead of considering it one among many capabilities, that may or may not be useful for a particular problem.

I think it's a bit disingenuous to reduce the article to a single sentence that's in parenthesis and links to a widely shared publication about an a MIT report. Especially when said article continues with "Don’t get me wrong: I am not denying the extraordinary potential of AI to change aspects of our world, nor that savvy entrepreneurs, companies and investors will win very big. It will — and they will."

One doesn't have to agree with the original report, but one can't in good faith deny that the whole thing smells of a financial scheme with circular contracts, massive investments for an industry that's currently losing money by the billion and unclear financial upside for most other companies out there.

I'm not saying AI is useless or that it will never be useful, I'm just saying that there are some legitimate reasons to worry about the amounts of money that are being poured into it and its potential impact on the economy at large. I believe the article is simply taking a similart stance

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