Chatbots don't help
from Why businesses lie about AI by Cory Doctorow
Chatbots don’t help. The internally facing chatbot that’s supposed to help employees figure out how to navigate the business sucks because it is only as good as its training data – the business’s documentation of its own processes. Businesses suck at documenting their processes. Customer-facing chatbots also suck. They either can’t solve your problem, or, when they seem to solve your problem, the “solution” goes nowhere.
The part I have some actual daily experience about: “Businesses suck at documenting their processes.”
True. And surprisingly unnecessary. This is not a technological problem, especially now. I do get that people are not naturally inclined to create and update documentation. But seriously, it has gotten so much more convenient with LLMs. I recently dug out and update the TightOps Fundamentals training for teams. One of the chapters is titled “Always be documenting”.
I keep coming back to this: You can barely do anything without good documentation. Or, look at it the other way: it really is what’s holding most businesses back leveraging more AI, AI-assisted knowledge work, and coding. An LLMs comes fresh into this world, or your project directory, aka repo. Your documentation is there so that you can onboard dozens of new “agents” each day. Do you get that?