'AI agency' grifters and AI bro slop
My old man owns his own painting business and is constantly harassed by these AI bros. Cold calls, emails etc all promising to 'automate' his business with ai.
And on top of that we recently had an AI intern start at my company and it kind of clicked something for me as a young guy in the IT engineering space. This person was brought in specifically for AI and yet the actual knowledge and infrastructure side just wasn't there. And that's not a dig at them, its genuinely everywhere right now.
These AI Agencies are just people saying 'agentic' and 'ai powered' a hundred times and quoting businesses like my dad five/six figures for what sometimes is just a GPT wrapper with no second thought.
It shits me because it ruins it for the people doing automation work that genuinely helps.
Anyway heres what's actually possible right now without the buzzword slop, I built an internal tool that reads vendor invoices with azure document intelligence and spits out reports for our compliance team. hours of work done by hand instantly squashed down to them just uploading invoices and getting the information they need within minutes.
Its not magic its just engineering pointed at a boring annoying problem. Heaps of SMBs have stuff exactly like this, loads of manual data entry, the same report copy pasted every week, some job that gets done over and over and a lot of it can be automated now and its finally cheap enough to bother.
I have been doing more and more automation at my day job as opportunities have presented themselves, im spending a lot more time in this space than i really should be. So i tend to look at what's the real problem and requirements instead of trying to find an excuse to bolt AI onto something so it sounds impressive.
And to be fair it does depend on your business, what's worth automating for a one person operation is completely different to a 300+ head count. You also shouldn't automate something just because you can, because no matter how good it is, it will break at some point, and that's just technology. So it has to actually be worth the hassle of maintaining, otherwise your better off leaving it as is.
a good example is my dad is old fashioned and doesn't even have a website and gets 100% of his work from word of mouth because he's the best at what he does. so no he does not need an AI generated landing page and a automated lead generator, if he did he would not pay you $10k for a grifter package.
Same goes the other way, sometimes the best bet is not needing someone to automate and just buy the $30 a month tool, 99% of the time the hard part isn't doing the automation its knowing what to build and what to just buy and how to make it work with whatever you already have.
And lastly to my rant the thing that really bugs me is a lot of the AI bros will happily run your customer data or financials through some random API and have no idea where it ends up or whether its getting trained on. I support & engineer for two businesses that are in heavily regulated industries so that stuff makes me nervous and its completely avoidable. If you really have to run a model, you can do it inside your own secure environment, your data stays in Australia and its not being trained by anyone's model. It's the same setup banks and hospitals use.
So yeah, ask away if you have any questions or if there's some manual thing eating your week and you're wondering if it can be actually automated?, is it worth automating? or you've had an agency quote you eight grand to completely rim you.
Side note - not trying to sell you anything