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/
Those are great points. The equation is more complicated though. Agents can work 7x24x365, never needing vacations or time off. Never getting sick. You can scale up or scale down instantaneously without having to fire anyone or hire recruiters or temp agencies. They never sue you for sexual harassment. They never complain. You don’t need office space for them, or parking, or coffee. You don’t have to take mamby-pamby management classes to learn how to boost you DEI or “EQ”. These things are a real capitalist wet dream. Especially when there are interchangeable vendors with no clear differentiators. Even more so if you don’t care about “customers” either. If you sell to the government or other businesses or even just to other divisions in your own company, the customer is irrelevant. Only the bottom line matters.