It’s not just complete and utter bullcr@p, but it spreads a dangerous myth while demeaning and degrading all of us!

Complete and Utter Bullcr@p

As per AI Employees Aren’t Real! Don’t Believe The Lunacy:

1. There is no Artificial Intelligence.
2. An Employee is a Person!
3. Fully Autonomous Software Agents Don’t Work.

Nor will they ever work with current technology as the existing algorithms, stacks, and technologies are not emergent, as has been proven, nor will they ever become magically emergent.

A Dangerous Myth

Psychopathic CEOs have been investing in technology for years with the dream of replacing employees who need fair wages, benefits, reasonable working hours, safe working conditions, and other costly annoyances with technology that can work 24/7/365 without any breaks, rights, or complaints. Given that each evolution of technology has enabled whole new categories of data processing and analytics jobs to be mostly automated, they have convinced themselves they will reach their technotopia in their lifetime where they can replace almost all their office workers with AI. For the past few years, they have heard the increasingly ridiculous claims of the Gen-AI vendors that “with just a few more trillion for dedicated data center construction and bigger model development, AI will achieve emergence and be able to do the work of a PhD level human” and have been waiting for that day.

Now you have vendors falsely claiming we have reached that day, and that, for less than the cost of an employee (or team), they can layoff entire departments and replace those employees with their custom Agentic AI that will do everything the employees did, flawlessly, 24/7/365, with the ability to scale up and take on more workload as needed.

But nothing is further from the truth. For example, this tech:

• can only be encoded/trained to handle known situations with appropriate responses; when an exceptional circumstance arises that is not in the encoding/training data, it won’t know what to do;
• is not flawless if any part of it is based on (Deep) Neural Networks or Large Language Models; the former will have a maximum accuracy rate and the latter will be completely unpredictable as you can ask it the same query five times in a row and get five completely different responses and there is no way this can ever be trained out (it’s another fundamental property of these systems, as per recent research); and
• only works well on tasks that are computationally oriented, not on tasks that are more emotionally oriented.

They are making false promises that is not only giving companies an excuse for mass layoffs, but an incentive for mass layoffs that will not only harm you (as you will be unemployed), but harm them and their relationships (when the tech pays a fraudulent mulit-million dollar invoice, allows safety checks to be bypassed, and replaces a long-term proven supplier with a cheaper imitator whose only goal is to extort as much as it can from the market before suddenly declaring bankruptcy due to CXO embezzlement).

Demeaning and Degrading

Even if you could swallow all of the lies by saying “it’s just marketing“, you shouldn’t because it is demeaning and degrading to all of us to equate a piece of software with an intelligent human and claim one can fully replace the other.

There is absolutely no question that a machine can compute better than we can. They were designed to be the ultimate computational machines that could flawlessly perform trillions of calculations per second, and that’s what they do.

There is absolutely no question that the machine can do certain tactical data processing and analytical tasks way better than we can or that they should be employed to do so. Moreover, the tech that allows them to do these tasks has existed for at least a decade, if not two, and workforce displacement was inevitable. However, displacement does not mean elimination, it means shifting towards more strategic, relationship, or manual tasks that computation cannot capture.

Accounts Payable departments were doomed to shrink (as we had invoice processing solutions almost 10 years ago that could, with the right effort, increase straight through processing rates to 90% or even 95%), statistical analysis and data reconfiguration departments were doomed to go the way of the Dodo (because the vast majority can be automated and what can’t can be consumed by the departmental analysts that need to do the analysis), and the need for Procurement Buyers was doomed to be minimized as time progressed (because you can automate catalog orders, standard RFQs, inventory replenishment, etc.).

But claiming that tactical computation can take over strategic reasoning, which “AI” cannot do because it’s not strategic (although it can compute inputs to well-defined models); that cold computation can replace warm relationships; and that dumb probabilistic mush can replace human intelligence is demeaning. Furthermore, pretending that you can replace a valuable human employee with a costly piece of dumb software is degrading. (It is considerably more costly than you think. See Joël Collin-Demers post on The Dirty Little Secret Behind Gen-AI Functionality Pricing on why these vendors are switching to outcome pricing, and the reason is to hide how costly this technology is relative to the return.)

Succinctly put, you shouldn’t put up with it. You deserve respect, and that is something that vendors claiming “AI Employees” are taking away from you!

This why Sourcing Innovation had to update it’s Product Review Requirements for the first time since posting them back in 2007! While it has no problem with Agentic AI (as long as it’s just enhanced RPA which we know works), and can even deal with Agentic Workforce (since it is doing a form of work), it cannot accept AI Employee and is drawing the line here because someone has to!

This is why, after 18 years, SI had to include as part of product review requirements that the vendor accepts that SI has a no Bullshit policy, which includes no (Gen-)AI Bullshit, and SI will NOT cover you if you make ridiculous or false claims (that are not backed up by live demos and/or case studies with a customer that will go on record); this includes, but is not limited to, claims of AI Employees that we have already debunked. It’s not going to peddle your panacea poison!

Here’s the dirty little secret they aren’t telling you. They aren’t building “AI Employees” (which aren’t real, by the way) because they want to give you a better, more complete, team which is able to work 24/7 and constantly process data, run analysis, respond to supplier inquiries, and have fresh insights in your inbox in the morning.

They are building “AI Employees” to replace you! Here’s why:

1. You Are The Hardest Sell!

A. You are the hardest negotiator! It’s what you do for a living.
B. You do your homework! It’s hard for them to bluff that no one else does this or we’re giving you a great deal when you’ve done your research and know 3 other vendors have similar capability, you know the quoted pricing from all their competitors, and you’ve talked to your association members and know what they are paying for the vendor’s solution.
C. You’re smart, and you know it. The LMFAO sales tactics CXO ego-stroking doesn’t work on you, and you question everything that sounds too good to be true. You’re one of the few holdouts preventing the ChatGPT-dystopia that would atrophy your cognitive abilities to the point you’d fall for their half-truths and beg for their system (which takes us one more step towards their dark city vision of the future).

2. IT Tries to Kill All Your Selections

You’re the biggest threat to IT’s total corporate dominance on system selection and management. In most organizations, every other department falls in line and eventually uses IT’s recommendations (allowing them to stay with preferred platforms or vendors that give IT the best software and hardware toys for free), but you question everything. You don’t swallow the one-vendor / one-ecosystem BS, the big volume discount BS, or the we-can’t-support-more-SaaS BS because you know Open APIs allow for ecosystem integration, that it’s not volume discount but ROI, and that, other then providing the API keys to the systems that the SaaS you selected has to integrate with, there’s no ongoing support requirements for IT. As a result, IT goes hard against your picks and tries to turn the C-Suite against you, complicating and delaying the deal process (and the longer it takes to sell, the greater the [opportunity] cost of the sale, and the less deals they can close in a year. Remember, to them, it’s not about the delivery, it’s about the close).

3. Your Budget is Baseline

In most organizations, Procurement is not sexy and is still seen as the biggest cost center (because too many executives believe profit is entirely dependent on revenue when anyone who can do basic math should realize that if P=R-E, then keeping expenses down can also be very profitable, and if the cost of goods sold is 90% of R, i.e. R – E = 0.1R, then it would take 9 times the sales to have the same impact on profit as reducing costs by 10%). As a result, your budget is baseline and there’s no wiggle room there, limiting their profit margins if they sell to you. On the flip side, they see other big enterprise tech companies making 80%+ margins for tech-cr@p they haven’t updated in years and the tech-bros raising millions, or billions, for AI with nothing more than ethereal claims of future capability, and they want a piece of the action.

But how do they get that action? Well, build something you can sell to the two biggest budget owners in the corporation: the CEO and the CXO, both of whom have been marketed to 24×7 for the past 3+ years by the A.S.S.H.O.L.E. and have now been completely brainwashed into believing that AI is going to totally transform their businesses while allowing them to lay off 80% of their cost-center resources (which, in their view, includes you!).

They’re only marketing to you to sneak in through the back-door, get your blessing, and then when you help them get in front of the CFO and CEO, off comes the grandma disguise to reveal the big bad wolf that lies beneath — a wolf intent on eliminating your job and your entire department so they can get ¹/₃ of the overall Procurement budget for their custom AI employees that will do all the costly functions you do, do them 24/7, and increase savings by increasing spend under management because they can strategically source, quick-quote, or auction everything you need to buy. (Even though this is an extremely bad idea. If you don’t know why, read our article on why real Procurement Leaders Listen To Roxette!)

In other words, if someone reaches out to you offering you an AI Employee, slam that door in their face as fast as you can while screaming at them to never show their face again! Because, if you don’t, you might just end up unemployed on the street corner screaming about how AI is ending the world, because we already know the inevitable that will happen once companies start relying on technology that hallucinates, (purposely) lies, fails at math, commits fraud, compromises your code, proliferates extremist views, blackmails you, maintains hit-lists, encourages suicide, lets you die to save itself, contemplates murder, and makes you dependent to the point of psychosis (so if got a headache, don’t take an aspirin or query an LLM). [Hint: it’s not good. There’s a reason I’m not yelling loud enough even though I’m already screaming at the top of my lungs.]