We were driving somewhere and suddenly decided to order some chicken on the way home (figured it would be done when we got there and we wouldn’t have to wait).
They required an app: my wife downloaded it, set up an account, picked the store that was on the way home (but not closest to where we were) and put the order into the app, only to have it fail sending it to the location.
Several times.
By the third try we were in the parking lot and I just went in and ordered.
Had a tech drive an hour and half to a site where the onsite staff couldn’t get a server to boot last week.
Somewhere between scheduling and actually driving down (half a day later), someone came to work that understood how the power button works, but didn’t bother to let anyone know that it was already booted back up and working.
I’m sure it’s a mixed bag, with plenty of small companies jumping in.
I own a very small company, but I also write a lot of our code, and we’re not touching anything “AI”. Not in our code, not in our products, not in any system we can keep it out of: We just migrated our last server from Azure a couple of weeks ago, we’re dumping MS Office this year, and starting the long slow migration from Windows desktop to Linux as an option for our customers (we’ve long been Linux on our servers, but have a lot of desktop software that needs to stay on the desktop).
But it’s everywhere. I had a call from our phone system vendor a couple of weeks ago. He kept trying to sell me their new AI call attendant, and couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t subject our customers to that BS. It’s been forced into our accounting software, billing software, cloud backup, everywhere you look it’s there now.
We have a binary file that has to maintain compatibility with a 16 bit Power Basic app that hasn’t been recompiled since '99 or '00. We have storage for 8 character strings in two ints , and 12 character string in two ints and two shorts.