ryan,

AI is absolutely taking off. LLMs are taking over various components of frontline support (service desks, tier 1 support). They're integrated into various systems using langchains to pull your data, knowledge articles, etc, and then respond to you based on that data.

AI is primarily a replacement for workers, like how McDonalds self service ordering kiosks are a replacement for cashiers. Cheaper and more scalable, cutting out more and more entry level (and outsourced) work. But unlike the kiosks, you won't even see that the "Amazon tech support" you were kicked over to is an LLM instead of a person. You won't hear that the frontline support tech you called for a product is actually an AI and text to speech model.

There were jokes about the whole Wendy's drive thru workers being replaced by AI, but I've seen this stuff used live. I've seen how flawlessly they've tuned the AI to respond to someone who makes a mistake while speaking and corrects themself ("I'm going to the Sacramento office -- sorry, no, the Folsom office") or bundles various requests together ("oh while you're getting me a visitor badge can you also book a visitor cube for me?"). I've even seen crazy stuff like "I'm supposed to meet with Mary while I'm there, can you give me her phone number?" and the LLM routes through the phone directory, pulls up the most likely Marys given the caller's department and the location the user is visiting via prior context, and asks for more information - "I see two Marys here, Mary X who works in Department A and Mary Y who works in Department B, are you talking about either of them?"

It's already here and it's as invisible as possible, and that's the end goal.

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