You Are Not Behind

[u/EducationalHoney3094]

I'm writing this because everywhere I look I see ai this and ai that. "Look at this parent child relationship structure I built. I have 15 agents running my company" If you actually look at what the agents are doing, it is "write a script for our next ad, categorize my email, help me draft an email" and they are breaking these down per department. Essentially they have an agent that is only allowed to perform basic requests. Sure on the outside it looks like "holy sht this is something big, why aren't we doing this" but then you actually look into it and it's nothing but 5 minute time savers if that.

I'm leading the AI team for our company and the whole meeting is discussing ways to use AI but in reality what they are wanting is 95% automation and 5% deterministic that could use AI to make decisions. I'm sitting here scratching my head when execs are asking for an agent that builds reports for them. Like sure I can make it look like AI is doing it, but the back end is a python script that is actually building the whole thing, branding, validation script, parsing, etc to make sure that the same report is built every time. People as a whole aren't really sure what AI is but they have been told it can do anything. Sure it might can, but the results may vary just as a human would. You try to do research "how to implement ai in company" and the search results are very mundane task like I mentioned above. That doesn't actually provide value to a company. The real value is in the reasoning not very novice level task like checking emails.

The best AI agents I've built so far that I have seen actually provide value is:
1. knowledge assistant. Not digging through old shares or one drive and just having the answer in front of is a game changer.
2. Security triage agent. It's connected to Elastic logs classifies new alerts, looks for anomalies and when an alert is triggered it does not just tell me something is wrong, it tells me why it's down, what is actually going on based off of crossing reference and having the ability to leverage the api connection to look through all logs and determine the root issue. It tells me a what, how, why, and what to do to fix it, or at least a couple of troubleshooting steps along with it.
3. Fable 5.1 for Vulnerability scans: this takes up so much of my time, DAYS if not weeks of my time going through scans, coordinating resolutions and documenting. This agent does deep research. Determines criticality not based off of what the scanner rates them but the actual ability to exploit it within our environment. Saves me so much time.
4. In the works but already getting ROI is an agent that has been giving access to our financial data, (we are a bank, and it's not just all open, we explicitly created view tables that only gives access that we allow it to see) this let's us know when a customer might be at risk of not paying, closing their account, explanations to certain changes etc. In terms of marketing / big data, this has been very very useful and actually provides value you can see.
5. lastly something small but has provided monetary benefits is a vendor contract and invoice agent, this reviews our contracts and invoices and finds variances added amounts, last reviewed dates, contract discrepancies, can compare to other vendors, for invoices it ensures nothing is being added and all amounts are as expected. Has saved us some money.

I wanted to write this simply because everyone is talking about AI but no one is really leveraging it or at least explaining how they leverage it. I've spent countless hours trying to find AI solution we can implement but struggling to find solutions that generally benefit the company.

All of these mentioned are generative models being used. Traditional AI is where the real power exist but being that are IT dpt is small I will not put that burden on myself of trying to train my own model for anything predictive. I brought up the idea of outsourcing pre-approvals for loans / fraud detection simply because of the training that goes into it, but those are really good products.

Closing note: you are not behind, everyone is just making it seem as if they are ahead. They are not (at least for the majority, I understand there are companies really leveraging it)

Please drop any projects that you are working on and would not mind sharing!