Ready or not, companies are betting on AI

This has been a big week for AI companies signing business agreements, with Zendesk, which revealed new AI agents who need to be able to solve 80% of customer service problems, anthropic and IBM announces a strategic partnership, and Deloitte also announced an agreement with anthropic. Plus, Google announced a new AI-For-Business platform.

This does not mean that it will be smooth sailing for large organizations using AI. In fact, the timing of the Deloitte message was a bit awkward, which came the same day as the Australia Department of Employment and Workplace Relations said the professional services and consulting firm had to pay a refund to deliver a report to the department with what seemed to be a number of AI-generated hallucinations.

In the latest episode of Equity Podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I discussed the latest AI headlines that contrasted it with last week’s news about the new Sora app. While AI companies can eventually make real money on social network apps, business agreements offer a more immediate path to significant revenue.

You can read a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity below.

Anthony: I think this actually ties back to our discussion last week about some of these Genai -social networks. We frame it as potentially a way in which these AI companies could eventually make money, which I definitely think is the case, but there is a long way to get there. And the business, sometimes people don’t think it is as interesting or sexy as a consumer, [but] This is actually where the real money is.

Maybe Sora is how Openai will make money five years from now, but that’s how these companies want to make money now.

And Deloitte [news] was especially striking. Sometimes you may feel like a bit of a broken record to just point out how these models [aren’t always] Absolutely ready for Prime Time, but I find it encouraging that the Australian government actually pushed back and said: No, you can’t do this.

It is not necessarily that no one should ever use AI in the creation of these kinds of reports, though I think you could come up with this argument. But if you want to do that, you should actually be responsible for output. In fact, you need to review and make sure that the quoted information is real. You can’t give birth to a model and just [say] “Okay, my job is done, but it will be many billable hours.” I think anyone who does it must be embarrassed and fine.

Kirsten: Absolutely. Sean, Zendesk also had a message this week, and they really create these tools that will handle virtually all customer service, where they basically removed man from this process. In your everyday life [life]How you walk around the world, or how car manufacturers, for example, handle service, you start to see that kind [automation] crawl in?

Sean: Yes, I actually wrote about it a few times. There are a lot of different startups that develop full customer service suites, voice agents, LLMs for E -emails and texts [from] dealers and service centers. In fact, I think it’s a worthy idea because the problem isn’t: We don’t have enough people to do the jobs to do these things and it will remove their jobs. It is that you can never get anyone on the phone or you are jumping around.

Especially by going to service, you are jumped to the service department. Everyone is busy. So if you can catch it exactly and make it easier for people to get an answer, the question is there for me how much will these companies adopt it and stick to it. There have been all kinds of technologies over the years, like web forms and similar things where these dealers have done it, but then they forget it. And then it just sits on their website and you think it will work and then it doesn’t work because they just want you to call them.

So I have some optimism and some hope that things like this actually become people’s first touch point with [a business]. And it looks like we’re about to figure it out.

Equity is Techcrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday.

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