u/Reds_PR

Was he just being humble? Were there other Lincolns of power?

When did he become The Lincoln?

Trying not to spoil but I have to say, the Hemingway is strong with these writers, from the first clue with Vesco on. And if Weecha is not Pilar, I’ll eat my Key West hat.

Chime in if you like, I left the spoiler lamp lit.

I’ve ended up in a corner of a multinational corporation where we have been tasked with proving the benefit of AI solutions. Up to this point, people have been proposing AI projects for their area and been forced to estimate the benefits, monetary and non-monetary as a means of prioritization. But no one had yet come up with a lookback to see if all these rosy estimates actually came true.

From the start, I was leery of how AI would reduce headcount. Minuscule time savings across a large population does not mean someone gets fired every time the aggregate across all personnel reaches 2000 hours.

And few in my company realize that you will never be able to discern benefits just from cost/revenue spreadsheet year-over-year because there are way too many independent variables affecting a department’s actual bottom line.

It’s my opinion that you should throw out the financial predictions in favor of KPI predictions. Those KPI’s might include a “cost per widget” or “revenue per headcount” measures, but I’m looking more at “did I produce more widgets in less time” efficiencies.

My overall approach is to establish these metrics in the various teams if they don’t already exist and then compare them against their own baseline 3 months, 6 months and a year after go-live. No matter what success criteria they are measuring for themselves, they will be judged against it.

In order to make these benefits comparable across departments, I’m going to propose reducing them to Z-scores, so that improvements and their rate of improvement are the overarching measurements of success.

To me, this should be a process for every project, not just AI. But my takeaway is that, in my company at least, the powers that be are finally pumping the brakes a little and realizing they may have swallowed AI’s sizzle and not gotten much steak. So they’re coming to a phalanx of guys like me around our world and asking us how much bang for their buck are they actually getting?

Has anyone else come up with a good way to measure AI’s cost/benefit? Are the headcount promises spurious? And are you seeing the initial signs of management panic in your own spaces?

Hint 1: the bait is also a clue.
Hint 2: “…What time is it in New York?”