I'm curious if the HN community has a good resources (blogs, podcasts, other content) on practical uses of SOTA AI to improve professional services (e.g. outsourced finance, etc.)

I've read a fair amount of what people think should be done (theory) but haven't found a ton of content from people who actually have done it (practice)

With regards to automation and outsourcing more generally, there was an Odd Lots episode [0] that had the following discussion:

- Guy owns a wholesale bakery that delivers to restaurants

- They do one delivery a day in the morning to each of their customers

- The options were to hire their own drivers or outsource to a delivery service.

The bakery owner points out that while it's cheaper to use the delivery service, there are a couple downsides:

1. He doesn't "control" the customer experience around the delivery b/c it's a 3rd party

2. If a customer has feedback on a delivery, it's less likely to get back to the baker owner b/c the service driver isn't incentivized to pass that back up the chain

I say all of this as someone who LOVES automating things btw. Engineers can be too focused on automation though and that can lead to worse overall customer experiences even if there are short term wins.

0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKGNctKpx8w

There is tons of possibilities of automation, but you have to split down general services delivery into underlying operational categories behind it, then you migh find relevant products/ case studies, if not then you have to dig deeper and decompose into smaller operational areas. In my case it was (software developement company) it was something like: frontend usability testing, frontend ux testing etc.

I would recommend decomposing and prioritizing:

  - what takes most of your time
  - what is needed to close the automation loop for a process

You can search for or look up the corresponding data and evaluation test cases on Hugging Face.