People seem to think it's all smoke and mirrors. IDK. My employer, in an industry as far removed from Silicon Valley as you can probably get, makes more and better use of it all the time. There's enormous amounts of work done every day in corporate America that amounts to "I need X, but X involves some data from legacy system Y and legacy system Z, and that's going to take me an hour to glue together because our entire enterprise runs on a system cobbled together over the past 50 years". You know what Codex/Cowork/etc can do really stunningly good these days? Take the files you provide, listen to what you want from them, ask clarifying questions as necessary, then write a script that programmatically does exactly what you ask for, checks its own work and then gives you the result.

We also realized that a project we thought was going to involve thousands of man-hours of very expensive, senior draftsperson labor to backport a feature into decades of CAD files we could, after years of procrastination, just forget! AI has got to the point where it can see and count what we need for us with greater accuracy, in our tests, than our very best humans, so we can just make the change going forward and let AI read the old files as needed.

There's incremental commercial adoption of that nature that I'm sure is happening slowly across the corporate spectrum, and that kind of thing is durable demand, not a bubble.

Note though that I'm talking about real revenue, etc. Not stock market bubbles. The feds been inflating that junk since the housing bust. We'll all pay for that eventually.

>There's enormous amounts of work done every day in corporate America that amounts to "I need X, but X involves some data from legacy system Y and legacy system Z, and that's going to take me an hour to glue together because our entire enterprise runs on a system cobbled together over the past 50 years

I did a bunch of that type of work pre covid. IME it's usually an hour to build and about 3-5 weeks to handle bureaucracy, data cleaning and detective work to account for the lack of docs. AI would probably handle that 1 hour's worth of work OK but using it for the rest of that work would be a shortcut to hallucination town, especially when the context is something you have to dig up by actually talking to people.

Also it's the only bit of that job that isnt mind numbing.

There's an enormous number of projects all over the economy these days which are being presented as an enormous "AI win" where the benefits were dubious at best, because it's become a clear route to career advancement.

I'm equally certain that it has its niches but ~80% of where I'm seeing it used it's either smoke and mirrors or creating more problems than it is solving.