McKinsey thinks you are holding AI wrong

Published on August 20 by

Can

I don't need to tell you that the "strategic" consulting company McKinsey is evil and full of shit. But this one is almost funny it's so bad. So, McKinsey did a survey trying to find out how implementing "AI" (whatever that means) has helped companies be more "productive" (whatever that means). Looks like the outcome was not to their liking, because this is what thy concluded:

Nearly eight in ten companies have deployed gen AI in some form, but roughly the same percentage report no material impact on earnings.1 We call this the “gen AI paradox.”

So, McKinsey, a company is who hyping up AI and trying to charge their customers to implement "AI initiatives", is admitting that companies who deploy gen AI see no positive impact on their earnings.

And because McKinsey are a bunch of dipshits, they try to seize this as an opportunity to make even more money. They call it the "gen AI paradox", and are saying:

The main issue is an imbalance between “horizontal” and “vertical” use cases. The former, such as employee copilots and chatbots, have been widely deployed but deliver diffuse benefits, while higher-impact vertical, or function-specific, use cases seldom make it out of the pilot phase because of technical, organizational, data, and cultural barriers.

What this sentence full of business buzzwords means is: "AI works, you are just doing it wrong".

Here's a better explanation for the "gen AI paradox": Companies see no positive impact on their earnings because it does not fucking work. It's not a paradox. It's billions of dollars invested into hyping up a technology that's smashing face-first into the hard ground of reality. It's the sound of a bubble starting to pop.

Look, I am not saying that there are zero useful things that LLMs can do. But they are far less and in between than the AI hypemen have been telling you. As Ed Zitron remarks in his amazing article The Hater's Guide To The AI Bubble: The generative AI market is a $50 billion revenue industry masquerading as a $1 trillion one.