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/

  • JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch
    0·
    9 hours ago

    Some other scenarios to consider:

    • AI company decides to up the profit by switching your agents to a cheaper, worse model behind the scenes while keeping your costs the same
    • AI company deciding that your business is plenty lucrative and now that you’ve onboarded their agents and they know your day to day, what do they need you for? You’re just a shell around their agents. So they cancel the contract, create their own competing business and poach all your customers.

    the interesting bit is, 90%+ of ai revenues come from a few big companies, not regular Joes. And i think ai is a way for some companies to just extract every drop of values from other companies, now that people are squeezed dry. So companies turning on each other, which might be fun to watch. It’s the logical next step in capitalism, if you run out of peopleto cheat and rent seek from, there’s plenty of easy corporate victims. Sure at firsst it’s, smaller mom and pop stuff, but no reason not to do it for bigger companies, might even have less overhead. And ai is perfect for that.