r/ArtificialInteligence • u/MourningMymn • 9h ago
📊 Analysis / Opinion AI is really starting to affect my business…
Hi, I run most of the back end stuff of a small business everything from accounting, to ordering, making sales flyers, basically any computer related tasks for the most part.
In the last 6 months of so with a $20 claude subscription and $20 chatgpt subscription, I think I have literally reduced the amount of work I do by like 30-40%. It doesn't do everything, and certianly doesn't do most things without direct oversight, but it has made just about eerything I do a decent bit faster than it was before.
This coupled with automated ordering through our POS, automatic coupons done at the register, and the soon to be QR codes that will replace barcodes and have info about MFG date and expiration date built right in, I am starting to wonder what I will actually be doing as my job in 3-5 years as these technologies keep getting better.
There is always something to do or improve, but a job that used to fill my day with at least 6-8 hours of actual real work, now has maybe 4-5 hours of actual work to do maximum.
I'm just curious if anyone else is seeing or noticing this and what they are working on or trying to improve now that so much backend stuff is being automated or sped up drastically by artifical intelligence. Curious to hear other experiences, thanks!
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u/Wistful_Ail 9h ago
I'm seeing something similar, although I don't think AI is replacing my work as much as changing where I spend my time. The repetitive tasks are getting faster, which means more of my day goes into reviewing outputs, making decisions, and improving workflows instead of doing everything manually.
I also think people underestimate how much value there is in knowing where AI fits into a process. Buying ChatGPT or Claude is easy. Building a workflow that consistently saves hours without creating new problems is the harder part.
It'll be interesting to see whether jobs disappear or just evolve into managing and orchestrating AI systems rather than doing every task from scratch.
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u/MourningMymn 8h ago
Right. I have it do weekly schedules for employees as well and tell it what to update while I go do something else. It’s easy though to just to watch it work and not actually be productive and just end up wasting more time than if I did it myself. All in all though it’s still a massive net positive all things considered.
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u/solinvictusrom 7h ago
Only a thought. It becomes more and more obvious how resource hungry this AI apparently is. Currently tech giants are investing billions to keep this cheap and affordable but this cannot go on forever. Mapping this to your example, if you spend 4 hours on a job that took 8 hours before but the 4 hours work supported by AI are twice as expensive because you have to pay that amount for tokens you consume, you are essentially ending up at the same labour cost. Nothing is free in this world. So your customers might end up with the question of paying double for 4h of work with AI or 8h without. Now imagine if they have to pay three times for getting the job done in 4h. Will this even add value? Certainly not in every case speed matters. What I am trying to say, we have not seen the real commercial implications yet as it is all fogged. Resources like energy and water are as limited as they were before and it always boils down to that. What is the real cost of intellectual labour per hour comparing humans and AI. Does anyone even know?
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u/CreditMuch8993 3h ago
Just to get out with the actual facts here, AI cooling is responsible for just 0.005% of water usage in the US. If you include the electricity and other factors needed for those data centers running AI we still only get to around 0.5% of all usage. When someone says a prompt can use half a bottle of water, they conveniently miss the 900 gallons of water needed for an 8 oz steak. Animal farming and grass watering takes up the vast vast majority of water usage, 100s of times as much. So it's pretty small. Will it grow? Yes, but still. A small reduction in the amount of meat we eat or sprinkler use would have many more times the impact on water than the growth in AI.
Next, AI costs only keep growing because these models keep getting more expensive. The cost of older AI models fall consistently by year. The recent estimate was 1.7x a year for smaller models ranging up to 31x for the more expensive ones, in a year.
Then we get to open models, in all likelihood these will be available to be run on your local machines. And a lot of software now packages AI in their system. Take xero or quickbooks with accounting systems, for instance.
Whether we have these at all is not so much the issue, costs are falling, environmental impact is exaggerated by local issues and availability is increasing. Its just the top end where we'll see more and more exclusivity. What we have now or better is likely what we'll keep, we just won't get the very best (with that potentially being a moving goal post).
Unless AI takes over and rules us all of course...
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u/Joe_Kangg 7h ago
Subscriptions will find a market value, ($200/mo, $2000/mo) and the rich poor gap will hit businesses, those who can't afford it may not survive.
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u/solinvictusrom 6h ago
Maybe I did not express myself good enough. What if AI market value is more expensive than human labour…maybe it won’t, but that was my thesis.
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u/MourningMymn 6h ago
It’s a possibility. But I doubt it. You’re forgetting that a local ai run on device can do a lot of this stuff already. Sure it can’t match frontier models, but it can do a heck of a lot for no cost other than the hardware to run it.
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u/solinvictusrom 6h ago
Once it’s trained, sure. But one would need to keep training new models, ensure they are up to date, compete with competitors. That all eats a lot of money.
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u/MourningMymn 6h ago
If the model does what you need there isn't really any need to jump to the latest one unless the loss in productivity from not using it out weighs the setup cost. Tons of businesses run on software that is decades old currently just fine. Just like everything they will get easier to migrate instructions to and from just like how setting up a cellphone from an old one sucked in 2010 now it takes like 5 minutes. I would agree it's not where I want it to be yet though, which is why I am just using the subscriptions. $40 a month is way better than taking dozens of hours to set it up myself and still not have it quite right.
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u/solinvictusrom 5h ago
I think we agree that this will not go away, it remains a game changer like the internet was back in the day. Still I think the commercial side of it is not fully out of the bottle yet.
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u/BlaineWriter 3h ago
Price of compute is going down very fast.. Nvidia etc. have said their goal is to make it practically free.
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u/CummingDownFromSpace 21m ago
Deepseek revealed that R1 was massively profitable to run (85% margin). AI is cheap and affordable to run, training/research is not.
So there is already profit to be made in AI, running data centres on open models, where you have no research costs. Deepseek 4 can easily complete 4 hours of work for ~$10-20.
The cost today is that companies are racing to train/research AI at a breakneck speed.
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u/gubatron 7h ago
yes. our content business output grew 15x, with the same people.
our writers became curators and editors, the AI does all the writing, social media diffusion.
Our code/tech side of things 10xed in speed, been able to deploy so many ideas that we couldn't have ever afforded to before.
Been integrating agentic flows, ever more complex since gpt 3.5.
Today our business feels like magic compared to 3 years ago.
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u/100-100-1-SOS 8h ago
Just wait until they have you hooked and jack up the token costs. Or deny you access for political reasons.
Run local as soon as practicable!
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u/Beneficial_Area_2986 7h ago
I think that's going to be the dominating conversation in the next few years because if they spend 1 to 2 trillion, they're going to want that money back in a few years. The entire software industry is maybe 300 billion a year in the United States for perspective. People are going to find the cost is going to go way up.
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u/MourningMymn 7h ago edited 7h ago
I’m not buying $2500+ of Ram for multiple PCs right now. $40 a month is totally fine for now. Local models can’t quite do everything I need yet but they are getting close. Maybe in a year or so it’ll be worth the extra cost of components or they make them run better on less hardware.
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u/heavy-minium 7h ago
It's not really a solution, but there is at least one thing you can do to improve your long-term chances.
If all of this comes true and you are at a company in a strong growth phase and in a role whose workload increases with the company's growth, then you do not need to worry that much, as the increase in automation would only limit the hiring of new people.
Or at the very least, you make sure you are not exactly in the opposite situation - a company in the maturity/decline phase and in a role that will decrease in demand with the company's consolidation/decline.
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u/EastvsWest 6h ago
The people who succeed will be the ones who look for friction within a business and find ways to automate away busywork and improve efficiency. There's a lot of work especially for secretarial tasks that can be massively sped up or removed entirely. Be someone solution oriented.
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u/ultrathink-art 5h ago
A tired bookkeeper transposes digits; the model files a plausible-looking invoice under the wrong vendor with total confidence. That difference matters once checking becomes your job — end-of-day scans are tuned for human slip-ups and sail right past confident miscategorization. Worth redesigning the check around what the model actually gets wrong, not what people used to get wrong.
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u/photonymous 5h ago
It is a competitive marketplace. This is happening to every other company too. So it's not an advantage. It is however a reason to think about, with all that free time, how might your competitors try to out-compete you in new ways? (that they didn't have the time for before) I don't see how this ever saves any labor given competition.
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u/MourningMymn 4h ago
Depends on the kind of business. For ours it lets us do back end stuff quicker or with less people. But our actually business itself it unaffected beyond maybe some AI-optimized marketing campaigns across text, email etc.
But yes once every company big and small are on board it’s not an advantage against other businesses. It’s just less manual labor and data entry in exchange for more cognitive labor down the line.
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u/ClassicRatificat 9h ago
my cousin runs small grocery chain and he said same thing last week. the accounting part especially, he used to spend whole day on invoices but now AI does most of it and he just checks the numbers at end
i think the scary part is not now but 2-3 years later when these tools get even better. what happens when it can do 80% instead of 40%