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.
  • chewypoops@lemmy.worldEnglish
    71·
    1 day 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
      8·
      20 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.
      • Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        21·
        10 hours ago

        Ooh, it’s the : build a prototype story!

        Dev, ok here’s the 2 week built prototype, slammed together wildly fast, no architecture, no seatbelts. Don’t push it in a demo.

        Manager: this Looks like a finalized project! Except a) and b), fix that, you got a day.

        Dev: we should productize it, to make it a solid product, it takes 3 months, then I can add a and b without it starting to smoke when used.

        Manager: No, I already shipped it.

        • chewypoops@lemmy.worldEnglish
          11·
          4 hours ago

          Oh wow, in your hypothetical, the DevOps manager is an incompetent moron. AI Agents will never recover from this one.

    • WesternInfidels@feddit.onlineEnglish
      12·
      23 hours ago

      I just want to put “$29 per month” into perspective:

      Imagine a white collar employee earning $100K per year. $100K / 250 working days is $400 per day. Payroll tax and benefits can easily add +50% to that, so it’s not a stretch to guess that our hypothetical employee costs the employer $600 per day.

      $29 per 20 working days is about 1/4 of 1% of that cost.