What are the actual use cases that can generate revenue or at least save costs today? I can think of:

1. Generate content to create online influence. This is at this point probably way oversaturated and I think more sophisticated models will not make it better.

2. Replace junior developers with Claude Code or similar. Only sort of works. After all, you can only babysit one of these at a time no matter how senior you are so realistically it will make you, what, 50% more productive?

3. Replace your customer service staff. This may work in the long run but it saves money instead of making money so its impact has a hard ceiling (of spending just the cost of electricity).

4. Assistive tools. Someone to do basic analysis, double check your writing to make it better, generate secondary graphic assets. Can save a bit of money but can’t really make you a ton because you are still the limiting factor.

Aside: I have tried it for editing writing and it works pretty well but only if I have it do minimal actual writing. The more words it adds, the worse the essay. Having it point out awkward phrasing and finding missing parts of a theme is genuinely helpful.

5. AI for characters in video games, robot dogs, etc. Could be a brave new frontier for video games that don’t have such a rigid cause/effect quest based system.

6. AI girlfriends and boyfriends and other NSFW content. Probably a good money maker for a decade or so before authentic human connections swing back as a priority over anxiety over speaking to humans.

What use cases am I missing?

I am working on a project that uses LLM to pull certain pieces of information from semi-structured documents and then categorize/file them under the correct account. it's about 95% accurate and we haven't even begun to fine tune it. i expect it will require human in the loop checks for the foreseeable future, but even with a human approval of each item, its going to save the clerical staff hundreds of hours per year. There are a lot of opportunities in automating/semi-automating processes like this, basically just information extraction and categorization tasks.

AI Customer Service is very frustrating to work with as a end user.

In healthcare, notes are directly correlated with $$$ for the hospital, because everything that is billed for must be documented with a mix of metrics (O2%, temp, lab results), events (orders, prescriptions, procedures) and notes (consultation notes, imaging interpretations, discharge summaries).

Billions get spent annually in administrative overhead focused on squeezing the most money out of these notes as possible. A tremendous expense can be justified to increase note quality (aka revenue, though 'accuracy/efficiency' is the trojan horse used to slip by regulators).

GenAI has a ton of potential there. Likewise on the insurance side, which has to wade through these notes and produce a very labor intensive paper trail of their own.

Eventually the AIs will just sling em-dashes at each other while we sit by pool.

+50% productivity for 200$/mo is outstanding value! Most countries have 0-2% productivity growth per year!

Even “only sort of works” is too generous for point #2. A dozen Claude Code agents spamming out code is… something. But it still does not replace a human, at all, even a junior one. It’s something else entirely.

One use case I'd love to see an easy plug-and-play solution for is a RAG build around companies vast internal documentation/wikis/codebase to help developers onboard and find information faster. I would love to see less of people trying to replace humans with language models and more of people trying to use language models to make humans jobs less frustrating.

The most important use for AI is for translation. Now anybody can communicate and serve customers and clients from everywhere in the world, and you can also translate all your customer-facing material into any language in the world.

That means you expand from millions to billions of potential customers.

#5 is an enormous use case that when well implemented will permanently replace prescribed character arcs

It is uniquely susceptible because the gaming market is well acclimated to mediocre writing and one dimensional character development that’s tacked on to a software product, so the improvements of making “thinking” improvisational characters can be immense.

Another revenue potential you’ve missed is visual effects, where AI tools allow what were previously labor intensive and expensive projects to be completed in much less time and with less, but not no, human input per frame

Stock images. I’ve already seen trining courses (for compliance reasons) using AI videos. A bit cringey, but I imagine cheaper than shooting real people.

> Replace junior developers with Claude Code or similar.

I don't know why everyone goes to "replacing". Were a bunch of computer programmers replaced when compilers came out that made writing machine code a lot easier? Of course not, they were more productive and accomplished a lot more, which made them more valuable, not less.

Part of the issue with all this AI hype is that I can't tell if you're joking or not. Most of those suggestions are horrible, 4 and 5 makes sense.

MS Copilot is quite useful for meeting minutes and summaries etc. Still not nearly as useful as good handwritten notes but saves loads of time.