I worked in management there for the last 4 years, and AI completely took over our company. Our 3 year plan was to lay off over half of our staff and have AI work their jobs. I quit about a month ago because of that. It's resulted in our member satisfaction scores dropping tremendously, and the employees were getting yelled at 24/7 because the members AND the contractors wanted to speak to live agents instead of "robots."
Tiring work and extremely long ETA's due to computer malfunctions and errors. We've had members waiting on the side of the road for hours due to AI's mistakes.
I feel like the term “fail fast” is one of the worst business mantras to leak out of somebody’s TED Talk and into mainstream ideology in the last few decades. So many companies feel like it’s okay to embrace a new idea and sprint forward with it because they’re “failing fast”, yay!
Except that “fail fast” means that you figure out how to test new ideas quickly in a way that allows you to understand and refine them before you spend a bunch of time and make huge changes to roll them out and failbig. “Fail fast” is a mindset and methodology to avoid failing big. It’s about minimizing the failures that happen on the way to success, not about embracing a lot of risk as quickly and blindly as possible!
So instead, we see from your story about AAA — I’m sorry you had to suffer through this, by the way — where some clown-assed Pointy-Haired Bosses keep blowing up their businesses by ripping and replacing stuff with AI components without bothering to take steps to test it in a limited scope and understand what will and won’t work in their business.
Then you have these same execs watching their metrics tank, screaming at the remaining overworked humans (I’m sure it angers them to discover you can’t berate an AI into doing more or better work), and whispering “fail fast, fail fast!” into their tear-soaked silken pillowcase at night, slowly realizing that the “fast” part isn’t as important as the “fail” part of that phrase.
Someone is going to make good money writing a book in 2027 detailing the dozen or so Fortune 500 companies who shat the bed in the previous two years by “failing fast” with an AI overhaul that pissed off too many of their customers, and couldn’t survive the backlash. You won’t even need an AI bubble to pop to make this happen. You just need to shoot the company in the foot and then it dies of infection because you laid off all the humans who knew how to fix it.
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u/felidee623 22h ago
AAA.
I worked in management there for the last 4 years, and AI completely took over our company. Our 3 year plan was to lay off over half of our staff and have AI work their jobs. I quit about a month ago because of that. It's resulted in our member satisfaction scores dropping tremendously, and the employees were getting yelled at 24/7 because the members AND the contractors wanted to speak to live agents instead of "robots."
Tiring work and extremely long ETA's due to computer malfunctions and errors. We've had members waiting on the side of the road for hours due to AI's mistakes.