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VCs are starting to partner with private equity to buy up call centers, accounting firms and other "mature companies" to replace their operations with AI

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Submitted ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨dantheclamman@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/23/khosla-ventures-among-vcs-experimenting-with-ai-infused-roll-ups-of-mature-companies/

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  • cyrano@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    lol accounting….

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    • Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Hey boss. Think they’re using chatgpt for that?

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    • vivendi@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      This is because auto regressive LLMs work on high level “Tokens”. There are LLM experiments which can access byte information, to correctly answer such questions.

      Also, they don’t want to support you omegalul do you really think call centers are hired to give a fuck about you? this is intentional

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      • Repelle@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        I don’t think that’s the full explanation though, because there are examples of models that will correctly spell out the word first (ie, it knows the component letter tokens) and still miscount the letters after doing so.

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    • Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      The idea of AI accounting is so fucking funny to me. The problem is right in the name. They account for stuff. Accountants account for where stuff came from and where stuff went.

      Machine learning algorithms are black boxes that can’t show their work. They can absolutely do things like detect fraud and waste by detecting abnormalities in the data, but they absolutely can’t do things like prove an absence of fraud and waste.

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      • futatorius@lemm.ee ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        LLMs often use bizarre “reasoning” to come up with their responses. And if asked to explain those responses, they then use equally bizarre “reasoning.” That’s because the explanation is just another post-hoc response.

        Unless explainability is built in, it is impossible to validate an LLM.

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      • vivendi@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        For usage like that you’d wire an LLM into a tool use workflow with whatever accounting software you have. The LLM would make queries to the rigid, non-hallucinating accounting system.

        I still don’t think it would be anywhere close to a good idea because you’d need a lot of safeguards and also fuck your accounting and you’ll have some unpleasant meetings with the local equivalent of the IRS.

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    • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      How easy will it be to fool the AI into getting the company in legal trouble? Oh well.

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      • Meron35@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        NYC’s AI chatbot was caught telling businesses to break the law. The city isn’t taking it down | AP News - apnews.com/…/new-york-city-chatbot-misinformation…

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      • pinball_wizard@lemmy.zip ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Some would call it effortless, even.

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  • arrakark@lemmy.ca ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    LOL. If you have to buy your customers to get them to use your product, maybe you aren’t offering a good product to begin with.

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    • simplejack@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      There is another major reason to do it. Businesses are often in multi year contracts with call center solutions, and a lot of call center solutions have technical integrations with a business’ internal tooling.

      Swapping out a solution requires time and effort for a lot of businesses. If you’re selling a business on an entirely new vendor, you have to have a sales team hunting for businesses that are at a contract renewal period, you have to lure them with professional services to help with implementation, etc.

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    • dantheclamman@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That stood out to me too. This is effectively the investor class coercing use of AI, rather than how tech has worked in the past, driven by ground-up adoption.

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      • Jimmycakes@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        That’s not what this is. They find profitable businesses and replace employees with Ai and pocket the spread.

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    • venusaur@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Plenty of good, non-AI technologies out there that businesses are just slow or just don’t have the budget to adopt.

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