Went to a trade show in Austin last week and noticed something weird

I was walking around this B2B services expo at the convention center and every single booth was pushing some kind of AI automation tool. Like 30 different companies all saying the same thing. Nobody was talking about basic stuff like customer support or contract management the old way. It got me thinking are we all just chasing the same shiny object now? Has anyone else seen this at their local business meetups too?

3 comments

3 Comments

kai_chen28d ago

That's exactly what I saw at a manufacturing expo in Dallas last spring. Every booth had the same pitch about predictive maintenance and supply chain AI, but nobody was talking about the actual nuts and bolts of running a shop floor. It's like everyone forgot that sometimes just having a solid process with human oversight beats another layer of automation.

henry_ross8d ago

And the flip side nobody talks about is how these systems handle edge cases. I watched a demo at a food processing plant last year where the AI kept flagging a perfectly good batch because the sensor data looked slightly off from the training set. Quality team spent two hours chasing ghosts before someone just walked over and looked at the product. The AI was technically right based on the numbers, but the human knew the real conditions. That gap between what the software predicts and what actually happens on a hot, dusty factory floor is where all the value gets lost. If a system can't handle the weird Tuesday afternoon shutdown where the air conditioner breaks, it's just another expensive distraction.

the_alex8d ago

Right, because nothing says "I've got this" like shelling out six figures for a system that gets tripped up by a Tuesday. My toaster has better judgment than some of these AI demos.