We're not seeing full automation for things that ought to be automatable now. Customer service chatbots still aren't very good. Salesforce ought to be taking over entire marketing operations, not just supporting sales but replacing it. The medical office side of insurance ought to be automatic now. The pick and place side of warehouse operations should be robotic. Shelf restocking in stores ought to be robotic. All of those things have been demoed, but didn't go to production.

The thing is with a lot of the world, you could say about the same in 1950 about why isn't everything automated by now. A lot of the technology needed to do most of everything we do was already there. They had vending machines selling cigarettes back then and today people buy their geekbars from a person in the 7/11, and we think we've progressed. Factories today still mostly only semi automated. You'd think mcdonalds would just be a single unit deployable crate burger factory by now, but it looks the same as it did in 1950 for the most part with humans doing all the work.

No one is actually given the agency in any company to set about and engineer and implement an automated solution that replaces existing business units. They also have to be given slack to fail and iterate. Easiest to just run mcdonalds mostly as you ran it the last quarter lest you rock the boat too much. Rinse and repeat and people still bag fries today, and the deep fryer remains probably the most dangerous part of the kitchen.

Yes, AI is still not particularly prevalent in the customer-facing / consumer-facing things you described. But internally, I think these companies are up to their eyeballs in AI automations. At the company I work for, the customer-facing side of our business has not really been changed by AI (except for faster iteration of website design, and a somewhat limited customer service chatbot - not particularly good like your experience). But internally we are using it for so many things, for example we have brought 3rd party analytics tools in-house (cost reduction and ownership over our data) by writing our own internal tools, we have setup custom systems to give ourselves better visibility over the business to try catch issues earlier, we use it to produce internal reports, etc.

I don't have much experience in robotics but I've heard that machine vision models have absolutely been changing the industry. And I imagine they are also using AI to write a lot of software too. But not my area, just what I've heard / been reading.

> All of those things have been demoed, but didn't go to production.

There's probably a good reason for this. Demos usually just show the happy case, whereas in practice you have to deal with all the nasty edge cases of reality.

Yes, that's because the tech sucks, unlike what the AI supporters claim.