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Comment by mparis

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Comment by mparis

There will of course be high-flyers whose wings will melt and that will fall back to earth, but don't be so quick to dismiss the teams that are bringing real value to industries that have historically been tricky to make more productive. For every red-hot AI demo that drops promising to change the world, there is some other team using AI to do something that may sound boring, yet is important..

For example, I work in healthcare and its difficult to over-exaggerate how much time it can take to do the most basic things. The people that are tasked with doing those basic things are often highly-educated, highly-skilled, and highly-paid; and it still takes a long time.

I suspect there is an unreasonable amount of cost to shed from doing simple things. Things like:

1. Reading, reasoning over, and copying structured data from lightly-structured, highly variable documents like PDFs.

2. Reducing the amount of time a human sits on hold on the phone. I'm of the opinion the AI doesn't even need to do the talking to deliver huge amounts of value. Just help me help my highly-skilled employees move from high-value task to high-value task without the tedium in the middle.

3. Login and copy basic details from any of the 1000s of healthcare specific websites, each of which does more or less the same thing, slightly differently. RPA has always been so costly to build and maintain. The high variation fan-out just got a lot easier.

In the short term, I'm most bullish on AI to solve these low-value, highly-variable, highly-annoying tasks. I'm also reasonably confident that the AI we have today is already good enough to do it.

Give it time and we'll start to see companies operate at margins that were previously impossible in industries that we thought were near-impossible to make more productive.

Replies mparis · 2025-05-22
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