Selfhosted

Thats certainly a take.

Also, whatever financials you showed to convince them it was a good investment

I don't show financials or propose these decisions, I get paid to design and sometimes implement.

As far as whether or not its a benefit, I'm going to have to completely disagree. As I previously mentioned - its a tool. They are great at detecting potential security issues in code data extraction and classification (especially with unstructured or poorly structured sources, like PDFs), knowledge base searches (especially where that knowledge may be spread across multiple internal sources like a wiki, memos, miscellaneous docs, etc), doc review for tone to meet standards, etc.

Your statement that it essentially doesn't pay to use llms is intrinsically tied to the OpenAI/MS/NVidia/Anthropic/etc "everything can be done with AI now!" marketing nonsense just the same as believing it has payoff for all scenarios. You recognize the "all uses are good uses" as being complete bs, but you're jumping to "that means no uses are good uses".

And that is decidedly not true.

The best example is that data ingest I mentioned. I had a client looking to bring in a bunch of differently formatted forms to a database. What they had been doing was taking their regular employees who handle these forms and using them for data entry - a pretty poor use of their time.

Instead, these scans were evaluated by a tuned model specific to their needs. Each form has a unique ID (though the way it could be numbered was very different), which then gets assigned to one of these folks for review at ingest. They are given a new unique number, and a verification flag (3 stages - first employee review, second employee review, and final import acceptance) which was basically the same flow as the previous setup.

The difference is that each person didnt need to hunt across the form to find the details. When the comparison comes up for approval at each stage, they get the snippet being brought in and the field its being applied to. It can be approved for that field, sent back for reevaluation, or sent for human only review (often this is because the scan sucked).

The project took less than 10% of the original timeframe, and the people handling the forms (and previously assigned for ingest) didn't end up with the stupidly increased workload that originally got assigned.

Again, using a tool at what its good for is what's important. Using it for what you think that it can do (ie: the executive method) is just piss poor practice due to easily convinced c suite who gobble up marketing nonsense.

Edit: For the record, hardware costs were under $50k. The consulting costs themselves were higher than that, and considering it was to originally take over a year to do, I'd easily bet it was a cost benefit even if they threw out the hardware after (they didn't, it got repurposed, its not needed for new forms).