No signs of AI payoff outside the tech sector

toomuchtodo

Related: Only 13% of companies see real returns from AI, survey finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50207881 - October 2026

drivebyhooting

I think you could say the same thing of tech and the economy prior to AI. No Signs of Tech Payoff Outside the Tech Sector. Manufacturing, basic science, education, etc languished while Big Tech reaped record profits and achieved stock heights for the last 15 years.

IshKebab

Yeah because vibe coding has only really worked for 3 months. Give it a chance! It'll probably be a couple of years before most companies even realise it's an option.

jstanley

"You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics." -- 1987

taormina

And we’ve seen tech sector payoff?

realusername

Pretty much the same thing inside tech, I love AI for my personal projects but the productivity return in my dayjob has been slightly negative so far.

trilogic

Many will fall for the road to be paved. This is the most advanced discovery for humans to date. There is no doubt it will succeed and is here to stay. It is still new (gold rush) and deregulated. A mine field for govs and businesses. We may see to big to fail crashing (.com bubble style or worse) but no one will ever stop AI.

tapoxi

We can use a non-deterministic system because we have test suites that act as validation gates. Other industries don't, so they have no way of knowing if the AI is bullshitting them outside of manual validation, which makes it more expensive and slower than doing it yourself.

secabeen

The tech sector is the most software-defined and virtual of all sectors, it's natural that they are first to change. Other industries need to make capital investments to adapt to change. You can see a similar history with electrification. A few industries went quickly, but then it took like a decade of little growth before the true benefits showed up. As an example, take a factory that was built around hyrdo-power like a grain mill. You can't just take an electric motor and drop it in in place of the water wheel. It doesn't fit, the wheel is outside, there isn't room between the mill and the wall, etc. Only when you completely rebuild a new mill building designed around the features and limitations of the electric motor do you see the major benefits. Same thing here; it will be new factories and new companies that are designed from the ground up around AI and its benefits and limitations that really move the needle.

zzzeek

great. let's pop this bubble so everyone panicking can leave us devs alone with our tools. GLM 5.3 is good enough if anthropic and openai go under (which they wont).

trvz

For AI to be properly integrated into businesses it would need to be enabled by people who would shortly after become irrelevant. This may well remain a "true communism/socialism has never been tried" situation.

yieldcrv

I've been doing workflow automations for many organizations for the last two years, and here is what I see: 1. every business unit and department was neglecting a best practice due to lack of investment in their organization. it has always been that way for decades and always will be that way because it isn't economically viable for it to be any other way. the workflow automations and agents we create act as digital workers that either do that neglected part, or let the rest of the organization do that neglected part. 2. the whole company always starts the year off with a bunch of goals, and by Q3 most of them are cancelled. now less of them are cancelled. both factors mean that anyone just looking at "worker productivity" or "did we save money" is going to get the answer of no. everything is costing you the same, or the AI itself is costing you more. whatever contract I'm working under is definitely going to cost you more, if you don't cancel all those enterprise SaaS seats we told you to cancel. I see a path to savings, but I don't think that's necessarily the metric to focus on. you need to look at the whole corporate structure, why are you still doing certain things, because those pressures will just make the org do more things because nobody is empowered to say "wait, maybe this is dumb"

haunter

Trickle-down AI economics here we go! Suuurely it will work this time, any minute now don't worry about it.

bob1029

I think we are struggling to achieve payoff within the tech sector. There have been wins with the customer facing side of the business, but the development team seems to be the biggest problem right now despite the direct & obvious applicability of these tools. I know they aren't a special unicorn edge case because I was very rapidly solving their issues before they stopped handing me things that revealed the lethargy. Within the sector where these tools definitely work , the biggest barrier to effective adoption is figuring out a way to undermine the various ideological high grounds. I have found the most effective argument to untangle this knot to be something approximating: Challenge: "Why should I adopt or help to implement technology that might eventually replace my job?" Response: "Because refusing to won't protect your job. It puts everyone's job at risk." It doesn't matter if you protect your job (not using AI) if the entire company goes to the bottom of the ocean as a consequence. The neat thing about this is that your job is part of the set known as "The Company" and if that ceases to exist, so does your job. Good luck suing a dissolved entity for unemployment or whatever. There is enough competition in most markets to punish anyone who thinks they can win on virtue alone.

blobbers

I would say the driving industry will get up-ended, but we'll see. It may just be workers get paid less because they only babysit the truck during very complicated times. Robots still seem far off. Its just like war, air superiority might make the war winnable but its the boots on the ground that are needed to actually take the territory.

AbstractH24

There is two ways of looking at this - one is that things are overhyped. The other is that there is so much more value to be extracted before this bubble burst. Not sure which I believe, objectively. Subjectively, inside of tech, it certainly feels like the former.

jonatron

In video production, 3D modelling, editing etc, I think a lot of jobs are disappearing, with cost dropping. Not data backed, just from what I can see.

briHass

We're a little early to be calling the game yet. The incredible improvements have only been over the last 9 months or so. Business, especially disrupting entire job functions, takes much longer than that. As is typical with this type of change, it'll be slow until a tipping point, then FOMO will hit.

TheAtomic

"AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs or fairness, all of which shape reputational risk and ultimately drive revenue growth and profit margins." For a sec I thought he was talking about private equity.

pokstad

> AI does not understand accountability, trust, culture, unwritten rules, ethical trade-offs or fairness, all of which shape reputational risk and ultimately drive revenue growth and profit margins. This reminds me of the book The Redemption of Time. An alien society incapable of lying has no other way to understand deception than to study an actual human mind. The different ways that we are capable of thinking can be so hard to capture in an artificial system.