Say I’m a company with 1000 employees. A company like anthropic is offering to replace each employee with some sort of agent. Suppose the agents cost roughly $80k, where an employee costs $100k. I take that deal because it saves real money and replace, say, 500 employees with agents.
Now let’s assume just for the sake of argument that these AI agents do exactly as promised and truly do replace those workers and all of their responsibilities. Things seem great, I decreased my costs a lot and my business is buzzing along.
Now anthropic comes to me and says they’re going to increase their prices to $100k/agent. What now?
Since you’re trading individual employees for a company that’s providing the service at a cost, it’s effectively like these agents are unionized, in a way. They ask for a raise and you don’t comply? Okay fine. No work for you. Nothing you can say or do will get these agents back
Not only that, anthropic can leverage the absolutely insane amount of data they have to squeeze you for everything you’re worth. They probably have actuaries on staff who can figure out the maximum possible amount they can charge you before you leave.
Going to a competitor is easier said than done. There’s a lot of underlying infrastructure with AI that needs to be changed and adjusted to make it work. Each model has its own strengths and weaknesses. So maybe, you go to a competitor and it’s back to 80k/year, but now, code has a 10% higher error rate and you start losing money
idk. it just seems like this desire to get rid of labor entirely can only backfire. This is one way, but there are so many others too.
Duplicated from source: https://www.reddit.com/r/trueantiAI/comments/1wj748w/wouldnt_using_replacing_employees_with_ai/
Your scenario is a good point. There’s also another one - that you invest in this company to carry your load and something happens to them, so they don’t raise prices, they stop providing the services. Now, maybe you can quickly switch to someone else, maybe that costs a lot to do and time as well. Maybe it affects all AI companies, and you’re screwed unless you can replace them with humans, probably asking even more than before.
Also another one - the original agents worked well. Then they try to go full Microsoft and do an upgrade which for whatever reason breaks things. Maybe the agents are worse for what you use them for, or maybe it’s just an incompatibility. Either way, damage control again, where if you had stuck with at least some or most of the humans you could weather.
Eggs in one basket. Humans bring diversity, flexibility, and adaptability, even if they cost more.