Execs at company I worked for wanted to send data to another company. They asked us to work with their vendor who used AI to map data and fix it………the vendor had a bunch of MBAs and no devs. They kept saying AI without any substance and were completely useless and time wasters. Eventually we reached out to the original company and mapped the data ourselves in a day…no AI needed.
I had a very similar experience with SnapLogic. It was much easier to just do the integration ourselves. We needed to integrate with a service that had a great Open API Spec, but were initially encouraged to use SnapLogic because it could do this magically for us. Turns out, you save money and time doing the integration yourself.
I use AI a lot as a helper for quite a few different tasks. I believe this push for AI and cloud is always bullshit to the detriment of the user.
There still is a problem with providing context to AI and especially the data volume of ERP systems is difficult for AI to deal with if not already reduced and preprocessed to some sensible values where answers can be directly extracted. The resulting chat bots aren't that much more proficient than what we already know, even if they have been trained.
There is a lot of hype around it and the tech is very helpful for certain applications, development support certainly is one area. But firing their own developers will almost certainly hurt the company in the long run. Granted, I only know people that work there for the money, so this "transformation/enshitification" was perhaps inevitable.
Every company wants to mention AI to appease shareholders yet tend to fail to state how exactly AI will improve their customer’s experiences.