Anyone who's actually used AI knows it's not replacing humans. Some highly specialized, deterministic models can enhance the work, that's all. Most of the time, it's just a convenient excuse to offshore or cut roles.
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Bro we skipped Cloud and are now AI eccentric. Fully on FIRE. Just look at our ARR on Cisco IOS on every box and claim its a software renewal. Funny math here.
If we were a software company then why are we taking a 1.8b loss on memory and purchasing ahead.
Behemoth looks great right now. the grilling on the Q3 earnings call is going to be brutal
Gross Margins look atrocious
Y'all are grokking your way through this quite well, but you're missing the part where AI-slop is used to weigh down and lower the compensation of the most skilled workers, who will be held responsible for the quality of all this AI-generated stuff.
"You missed the security vulnerability in your review of 100K lines of code that somebody you will never meet generated with an AI in 20 minutes! No bonus for you!"
@ca PMs in top companies (Google, Meta, Stripe, etc.) are extremely technical with very strong professional engineering backgrounds.
Why they have literal office secretaries here? It's a tech company not Dunder Mifflin.
Engineering orgs are shifting toward more lead P.Eng's, reducing (translation not-so-slowly eliminating) these high school secretaries' and their "coordination with the stakeholders"
By practically dissolving lots of things in the regional CXCs Cisco just infirmed your statement "AI is not replacing humans"
There was a lot of sh-t work outsourced to these, they were seen like regional low cost solutions to tedious or time consuming problems. AI can deal with that and more
If you believe AI can't replace humans you are not understanding AI and its use cases. This is not about replacing the deep thinking that a talented and skilled engineer would bring to the table. It is a about volume work where thousands of minions work tireless crunching or combing data that a machine would do easier faster and more accurate.
Sorry for the wake up call. You lost contact with the reality if you believe what you believe. Yes the companies are exaggerating these days laying off more people than they should .... there will adjustments but make no mistake, there will be a big hit for job numbers caused by AI
It has little to do with actual results from the AI experiment...right now.
It's a financial pump & dump at a level you're unaware of. $T institutional investors use their controlling interest to pressure public companies to reduce costs/improve margins by using the AI engines that those $T investors also have a controlling interest in. This manufactures growth for the AI authoring companies, and if any of the public companies actually manage to reduce costs, it's all only upside for the $T investors.
To simplify it, it's just two different businesses being set up to benefit the owner(s).
But then, also factor in the investment for data center buildouts, real-estate sales for those new data centers, energy demand, cooling, gov't/military, and many more industries.
AI hype exists because it means growth across a huge swath of industries, and it's a convenient scapegoat for LRs. What we don't know is when the dump occurs. Certainly, financial growth will not be sustained.
The actual results from your specific implementation of AI doesn't factor in anywhere in the beginning. It matters later, and if companies see poor returns with AI (which we are seeing already), then there will be a revolt and a financial dump.
In the end, gov't will likely be the ones to control the actual useful AI. Everything else will be silly videos and play things.
My manager is non-technical and doesn't really understand what I do, obviously thinks AI can save 30% of my time or so because that's the target they've got. My manager's manager is also non-technical, obvlivious to what I do... Needless to say they are convinced AI can save that 30% of time.
They will never walk the talk, they are PMs with no technical background that do not understand what engineers do at Cisco; they fall for the hype because they have never been on the other side doing the actual work.
sunk cost, all this money is spent so it has to be offset with reduction in headcount cost