Readit NewsWhat is the point of an agent running and you don't trust it?
That would be equivalent to calling this whole AI wave useless. May be it is, maybe it is not.
I think you'd want it to correctly compute your taxes. Especially if you get a letter a year or two after the fact saying you owe the government money
The alternative scenario is they get better and do some work really well. That is an interesting territory to focus on.
Once you shift to billing for outcomes like "resolutions," the vendor switches from a utility provider to the judge and jury of their own performance. At scale, that creates a "fox guarding the henhouse" dynamic. The friction of auditing those outcomes to ensure they aren't just Goodharted metrics eventually offsets the simplicity the model promises. Frankly, I just cannot and will not trust the judgment of tech companies who evangelize their own LLM outputs.
I get the binary part. The biggest difference is the subjective component of outcome? However, a tech provider - especially Agent provider - has to bring down the subjective to a quantitative metric when selling. If that cannot be done, I am not sure what we are going to be buying from Agent builders/providers?
If there is zero slack, and only the hardest parts, this is no longer the job it was before. Salaries will have to go up, or retention will go down. In addition these jobs could already be awful when there was some slack, removing all slack tasks to AI is going to make them miserable so average customer interaction once they get to a human agent is probably going to be worse so your customer satisfaction will take a hit. So I better get discounted with that reputational hit.
It's like the 'have AI pick the tomatoes it can, and the field worker the rest'. Picking the easy tomatoes is factored into the job. Having the ai pick the easy ones could break the whole model. Of having zero slack for the workers could break them and result in no one showing up to jobs where AI has done the easy picking.
Is slack intended for Employee welfare? Come on, we are talking corporate here.
The support services are already regimented - L1, L2 etc. I am not a fan of AI either, but it may be a new reality.
AI agent developers internally have a metric they are targeting to improve. That itself violates goodhart law.
No I do not.
Your accountant has to build in margin that you pay for for clients who stiff him on the bill or who he has to take to court to argue he did the service as described in the contract. If you didn't hold that threshold over his head, he would be able to charge less. Would he? Maybe not, I don't know the guy, but he could.
I think that is the core of the argument. It is the risk-sharing between buyer and seller. If sold on outcomes, seller carries all risk. If sold on work-put-in, buyer carries all risk.
Add to that, in some scenarios, outcomes themselves are fuzzy.
Oh! Yknow that thing we were charging you $200 a month for now? We're going to start charging you for the value we provide, and it will now be $5,000 a month.
Meanwhile, the metrics for "value" are completely gamed.
Most machinery you can't run 100% capacity. Most machinery you can't run 24/7. You schedule load. You schedule downtime. And the higher the capacity, the more the machine costs. If you aren't aware of this for your people you are failing at your job.
You are saying, employees stick around if they are given easy tickets, and companies care about passing along easy tickets so warm bodies do not churn.
That will be a big claim.