Accenture sells AI transformation to thousands of clients while quietly telling its own employees they get a fraction of what some were already spending. The internal memo reveals a tension at the heart of every major consulting firm racing to profit from AI.
  • prime_number_314159@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    1 hour ago

    If AI makes you twice as productive, and there’s fewer taxes on spending money for tokens than there is for spending money on salaries, the rational amount for a corporation to spend on it is more than a human’s entire salary, per person working with it.

    Naively assuming corporations approximate rational actors, and AI does measurably improve productivity, this implies a gain of roughly 2% if these employees are earning federal minimum wage, or well below 1% if they earn average software developer wages.

    Maybe their contract deliverables are poorly suited to this use case or something, but if they are given a fixed amount of money to produce some software item, then it makes sense to prioritize productivity per dollar.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 hour ago

    “You must use AI!”

    “No, no, no, no….not like that!”

    Just trying to shoehorn profit into a system that was never going to deliver one in the first place.

  • plz1@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    3·
    2 hours ago

    I didn’t realize the business plans were token metered differently from the Pro plan I’ve been on for a while. $20/month, and it has session/weekly limits, but I rarely hit them, and I use it, a lot.

    I do wonder if this will encourage businesses to branch out into running local models for simpler tasks.

  • chewypoops@lemmy.worldEnglish
    32·
    10 hours ago

    I have a friend that works there. They told me about this, and I was like “per day?”

    I was not prepared to learn that the budget was less than a dollar per day. Might as well just stop using AI agents that that point.

    • jj4211@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      3 hours ago

      Might as well just stop using AI agents that that point.

      I don’t work at Accenture, but at a group that had a similar journey from adoption to scaling back to only the included tokens and I would say that is precisely the idea: giving up on ‘Agentic’ use of AI, but still have enough for some acceleration.

      From what I gather, in our group the findings were:

      • Obviously, it was costing a heavy chunk of change and then even more expensive when rates were hiked
      • There was no good way for them to even know what productive end the spend went toward, they know which employee expended a bunch of tokens, but no idea what they would have used it on
      • Despite a crank of volume of stuff, they weren’t seeing any business value of the stuff. Requests still took about the same time to fulfill, etc
      • The most eager AI producers got ahead of their skis, and their stuff was useless because nothing and no one could reliably fix/tweak it after a certain point.
      • All the scary ‘AI will ruin IT security’ that the AI companies themselves have been expressing likely didn’t help either.
      • Perhaps the most uncomfartable of all, they found out that however good or bad an AI project turns out to be, management can’t tell the diference until it is too late. Being able to ‘manage’ the content has always been flawed, but the AI dials it up to eleven by ‘looking’ just right as a demo to someone that understands neither the customer nor the process of creating the work, but blows up in their faces in delivery. Kind of like how so many technology article writers breathlessly talked about the photoshop clone, despite many of them never having touched the relevant software, then heavy users reporting that it is actually shit, but the people writing about it have no context to know, but felt compelled to talk about it anyway. Those are management in the fields using AI.
  • Arghblarg@lemmy.caEnglish
    18·
    10 hours ago

    Nevrr forget, Accenture used to be Arthur Anderson, of Enron infamy. They deserve any financial ruin they get, IMO.

  • Armand1@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    7 hours ago

    In my company some of the top users spend over $3000/m. $29 is maybe 30 mins - 1 hour continuous running for a *medium" sized model like Sonnet. Not sure about cheaper models.

  • CosmoNova@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    9 hours ago

    Well duh? I doubt $29 get you anywhere at the moment and that nonsense is only going to get more expensive.

  • PetteriPano@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    9 hours ago

    $29 is enough for one of them pro plans. That’s plenty if you’re not wasteful.

    But do companies like Accenture get that subsidized plan at scale? At API rates that can easily be thousands of dollars.