‘AI is not doing its job and should leave us alone’ says Gartner’s top analyst
- Reference: 1750145530
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/06/17/ai_not_doing_its_job/
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Speaking at the firm’s Data & Analytics Summit in Sydney, Australia, today, Brethenoux said he didn’t have time to read summaries of meetings two or five years ago, before the creation of such documents became a key application of generative AI.
“I don’t have time to do the five actions in the summary,” he added. “I know what I have to do.”
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Brethenoux also questioned why AI-generated meeting summaries list action items from a meeting instead of AI just doing the work itself.
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“Just go and do it already,” he said, and called for AI to simplify users’ lives by automatically performing tiresome tasks.
He cited a use case at US healthcare company Vizient where the CTO asked employees what tasks bother them on a regular basis – the sort of thing everyone dreads having to do when they arrive at work on Monday morning. Armed with feedback from thousands of employees, the company automated the most-complained-about chores.
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The result? “Instant adoption, zero change management problems,” Brethenoux said. Employees then bought in to AI and started to make good suggestions for further AI-enabled automation.
The analyst labeled this approach “Empathy AI” and cited another example of it at a real estate company that must go through 17 steps to assess whether it will rent a property to a prospective tenant.
[5]BT chief says AI could deliver more job cuts, hints at Openreach sell-off
[6]Half of businesses rethink ditching humans for customer service bots
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[8]Analysts welcome ACID transactions on real-time distributed Aerospike
The company assesses candidates on each of the 17 steps in sequence, so a failure on step 16 meant it had wasted time working on the previous 15 steps. The org now uses AI to automate all steps in parallel.
Enterprise tech vendors currently advocate for automation using AI agents – bots that can perform some tasks independently – to automate the boring parts of IT ops or to work as a kind of personal assistant.
Brethenoux thinks tech buyers must take that vision with a large pinch of salt, for two reasons.
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One is that AI agents are not new. He said industrial companies have used them for decades in relatively closed systems. While they now rely on agents for certain tasks, they have seldom found the software can handle very complex tasks.
Yet vendors are suggesting personal AI agents will easily work with many sources of data across an enterprise and do things like automatically decide a worker should attend a meeting, then place that meeting in their Outlook or Google calendar.
“Now you have 50,000 agents running around the enterprise,” he posited. “How do you orchestrate this? How do they negotiate?”
Brethenoux said he’s asked vendors how such automated scheduling would consider competing needs of an employee’s boss, partner, or kids. Their response, he said, is “silence.”
The analyst thinks vendors and users have not given enough consideration to how to build agentic systems that address those issues.
“This is a software engineering problem,” he said. “You need people who understand you decompose systems, when they can communicate, the degree to which they communicate, the different autonomy levels that you give within an agent.”
Software engineers also need to determine what information agents can perceive, what they can control, and what they can execute upon.
“It’s not trivial,” he said.
Vendors know this, he said, but are nonetheless promoting the idea that [10]agentic nirvana is within reach.
Brethenoux said the current wave of AI hype is fueled in part by conflation of the terms “AI agent” and “generative AI” – and use of fuzzy definitions for both.
He lamented that practice by sharing an aphorism attributed to French philosopher and Author Albert Camus: “To misname things is to contribute to the world's miseries.” ®
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[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/10/atlassian_rovo_free_teams_news/
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Re: You can't replace people
When I returned to the UK after living abroad for years, I needed car and home insurance. Comparison websites were universally useless, no acceptable previous addresses, no UK credit history: "computer says no".
I went to a local broker, with real people who could look at the big picture. They not only found me reasonably-priced insurance, they even found two companies that would accept my foreign driving history and give me a corresponding no claims bonus.
Re: You can't replace people
People makes for the biggest cost for a corporation, so people must go away. This is what drives the pipe dream of AI. And of course if it really could happen it probably would lead to famine and insurrection and civil war pretty fast. After all, what should we do with all of these ex-workers that are now useless?
Re: You can't replace people
Even more useless from the company's point of view: they don't have any money to spend on your product.
Isn't it time that some sort of social responsibility were a required part of a company's controlling articles? Little things like 'look after your workers' or 'don't sell them' or 'give them sane salary and conditions'? After all, it worked well enough for Rowntree, Cadbury, and Salt...
Re: You can't replace people
@Neil Banes the benevolent capitalists you mention actually represent a more mature version of society than that evidenced by the current Tech Bros. Which proves that the onward march of civilisation is not a given, but something we need to nurture, defend and argue for.
I could easily use AI to sort out my Monday morning chores. Open inbox, delete all new messages except those from my boss. Job done.
Usefully done? Maybe not so much.
The org now uses AI to automate all steps in parallel...
What, so it can get them wrong all at the same time?
Let me share with you a little story about an anonymous company I shall call Pottish Scower. Pottish Scower started, out of the blue, sending me text messages saying I'd not paid my final bill. Which was odd, because I'm not actually a customer of Pottish Scower.
Bemused I attempted to reply to the text message - getting an automated "This is for outgoing messages only, do not reply to this number" response. Thus thwarted, I went to their website, where it suggested that my query could be resolved by using their online chat.
This led me to a chat bot that would insist on me giving it my customer ID number before doing anything. It was incapable of grasping the concept that I didn't have one, and that's rather why I was trying to talk to someone. All attempts to get it to let me talk to a human fell into a black hole of total incomprehension.
That having failed, I tried calling them. I got put through to a lovely "AI" powered call centre, that asked me to read it my customer number. Which I didn't have. All it was capable of doing was repeat "I'm sorry, I didn't understand that. Can you please read me your customer ID number?" After pressing every button I could find I managed to talk to a human - in the sales department. Apparently this is the only department at Pottish Scower that actually employs humans. They listened to my problem and tried very hard to convince me that the best thing for me to do was switch suppliers, because they could do me a very good deal on my electricity supply.
No thank you, I insisted, I just want you to put me through to which ever number contains an actual human who can resolve this problem and stop me from getting these blasted texts every morning. The salesman then admitted that he wasn't actually able to perform transfers to another number, since all the other departments had been moved to a different call centre - but he did have a number I could ring. It was the same number I had used to get to him in the first place.
Thus thwarted for a third time, I tried emailing them.
I got an automated reply from their mail answering bot that explained very politely that I had "Forgotten" to include my customer ID number, and that I needed to write back with it included or they couldn't help me.
At this point I blocked the number on my phone so it's no longer capable of texting me. I guess someone's going to never find out about their final bill not being paid.
This is what the reality of "AI" powered customer service looks like.
Re: The org now uses AI to automate all steps in parallel...
In auch situations ceoemail.com is your friend. The CEO won't see your complaint directly but I suspect CEOs are building support teams in direct proportion to the shittiness of their alleged customer service.
At some point, I suppose the CEO complaints team will have its own website. That will then become AI-powered and we'll start complaining to the CEO again.
Re: The org now uses AI to automate all steps in parallel...
Funnily enough I nearly changed to a company with a very similar name, but when I tried to double check my new tariff it kept logging me out and the only support available was a stupid chatbot that didn't work.
I cancelled moving my energy contract - if anything went wrong it would very clearly be impossible to access useful support.
You can't replace people
* Massive sigh *
I really, really wish we could just get our heads around this oh so simple premise.
Although there are many areas where automation/machines can massively help with productivity they cannot - and never will - be able to be human. By definition it isn't possible. It's a non-starter. It's a pointless endeavour.
If you look at how society has progressed over the last hundreds/thousands of years, pretty much the entire progress is the result of human interaction. Admittedly that very same thing has also caused some "backwards" steps (i.e. war and other negative events). But the overwhelming majority of human interaction and cooperation has had a net positive effect.
Given there are so many humans in the world (arguably too many) why don't we just make better use of what we have rather than trying to invent some other bullshit to replace something that doesn't need replacing?