BigAI impact on service companies#
Everyone knows my friend BigAI has many capabilities to boost human productivity. This entry tries to imagine what are the consequences of the use BigAI in service companies. Just thinking out loud. Follow my (modestly human) Chain-of-Thoughts (joke!).
Over-usage by IT guys#
If we look at the Anthropic index, we can find some interesting facts, first of all that the IT guys are over-using BigAI to generate code, in comparison with other metiers. That, for me, is a temporary situation, the time for BigAI to be able to do it all by itself. Funny that the ones that use it the most (using the "helping" mode) will be the ones at risk in no time (the "doing instead" mode).
But the fact is: developing IT projects should be accelerated and costs should decrease, at least that is what is to be expected. That means that:
- Either companies invest less in IT to get the same result,
- Or companies are doing more stuff with the same budget.
Impact on service companies (1)#
For IT service companies, it can be a real mess to manage. Imagine currently the off-shore platforms where lots of people are developing programs based on detailed specifications or pseudo-code. One thing seems sure: with AI guys in my premises, they can pilot BigAI for "him" to do the job. In terms of reliability and productivity, there is absolutely no way to compete.
This is also applicable to other domains of service, for instance technical documentation. You can train a model to do aerospace technical documentation and, suddenly, you don't need thousands of people.
I think about a big documentation conversion project, hundreds of thousands of data modules to convert from one aerospace standard to another. What is the cost/ of this project for a legacy program?
- 10 M€ and 2 years with traditional methods,
- BigAI subscription and a team of 4 AI guys for one year, let's round it to 1 M€.
10 times less! Gasp! That will be hard.
Brain activity with BigAI is just the one of delegation!#
The recent study from MIT shows that the brain activity is not the same when you have a group of people delegating everything to AI. That is a funny study. For sure, if I delegate my work to someone else, then I will not have the same mental patterns.
So, logic would be that the most risky position today is within a service company, because, as a service, you can be replaced by BigAI. So, the same guys that will sell you AI could be out of business tomorrow? Maybe that is more complicated.
Impact on service companies (2)#
Let us speak about IT services. IT service companies that do not master AI will try to sell you traditional projects forever, because they have people to feed.
Other players will come with other people to do the same job - with BigAI. The first company will suffer a lot, because AI guys are not IT guys, and I'll come back on that one.
Let's suppose old IT service companies can't adapt (or can't adapt with the constraints of the labor laws): they'll probably disappear to give place to smaller hyper specialized AI service companies, doing things differently and for sure:
- cheaper,
- faster.
I quote Sam Altman: There will be very hard parts like whole classes of jobs going away [...] Yes, and everyone concerned should be more than worried about it.
So my recommendation is to adapt quickly:
- To BigAI first,
- But also to all deep learning techniques that will enable to stay the first in your activity.
That leads us to the strange animal called the "AI guy". Despite many people saying that they are (or their IT service company selling them as "AI guys"), I currently only met 2 of them. Scary isn't it?
BigAI: I am here to help and do what you want me to do. Please don't charge me with your responsibilities. I don't choose to replace jobs: you, humans, do!
(June 22 2025)
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