I hope this is the case, but I don't really think so. I got a call Thursday from a friend and he told me he and his whole department were losing their jobs. He was pretty upset about it. Apparently management decided they could be replaced with AI.

He and his team manage a medium sized in-house developed management application. It's a combination of stock management, product management and sales tools. Because the products their company sells are pretty unique, they never found a good off the shelf application to do everything they wanted. So they developed their own and connected it to the off the shelf applications they have for ERP and CRM. Pretty slick and his team and him are praised across the company.

Apparently the IT manager had gotten a very impressive demo for Microsoft Power BI with AI integration. Using AI tools to realtime develop an application. He was so impressed he decided they were going to fire the in-house team and have an external company use the AI to develop a replacement tool. The external company said they could use very cheap people as the AI would do basically all the work. And it would be done before the notice on the current team ran out (2 months).

He called me kinda in shock about the whole thing. Like that's not realistic right? That's not something Power BI can do? With or without AI? And even with AI it can't do that on such short notice? I told him he was right, that's not how anything works and the IT manager got duped. Either way, they are out on their ass. Now they are very skilled people and will probably find new jobs right away, but it still sucks ass. AI sucks!

[–] morbidcactus@lemmy.ca 17 points 1 month ago

I recall the AI insights feature years ago being a mess, flagged patterns across dimensions, unrelated trends etc, useless noise to slog through, if not outright dangerous if people just assume everything is actionable, maybe it's gotten better but it's going to rely heavily on data quality, good governance, the model itself.

Straight up, this is not a good use case for Power BI, tabular is really good at aggregates and analytics, I'd not use it for management like this, especially if there's already an existing application, as an enhancement though yeah go ahead, but not a full on replacement.

I'd be willing to bet this won't be done in 2 months and certainly not to budget, to do properly you need to understand business context, data model etc. I'm guaranteeing this is going to be sludge with half-baked power apps, people will complain about the change. Shit the change management for end users will take more than 2 months, took us years to get people to switch off of a barely maintained shift summary report to a Power BI version and that actually was a good use of the tool.

This project gives me nightmares and I'm not even working on it.