I have one that serves a few functions- Tracks certificates and licenses (you can export certs in any of the majorly requested formats), a dashboard that tells you when licenses and certs are close to expiring, a user count, a notification system for alerts (otherwise it's a mostly buried Teams channel most people miss), a Downtime Tracker that doesn't require people to input easily calculatable fields, a way for teams to reset their service account password and manage permissions, as well as add, remove, switch which project is sponsoring which person, edit points of contact, verify project statuses, and a lot more. It even has some quick charts that pull from our Jira helpdesk queue- charts that people used to run once a week for a meeting are just live now in one place. It also has application statuses and links, and a lot more.
I'd been fighting to make this for two years and kept getting told no. I got claude to make a PoC in a day, then got management support to continue for a couple weeks. It's super beneficial, and targets so many of our pain points that really bog us down.
A lot of businesses can get by just fine with making it one person's responsibility to maintain a spreadsheet for this. It can be fragile though as the company grows and/or the number of items increases, and you have to make sure it's all still centralized and teams aren't randomly purchasing licenses or subscriptions without telling anyone, it needs to be properly handed off if the person leaves/dies/takes a vacation, backed up if not using a cloud spreadsheet... I've probably seen at least a dozen startups come and go over the years purporting to solve this kind of problem, other businesses integrate it into an existing Salesforce/other deployment... it seems like a fine choice for an internal tool, so long as the tool is running on infrastructure that is no less stable than a spreadsheet on someone's machine.
In the startup world something like "every emailed spreadsheet is a business" used to be a motivating phrase, it must be more rough out there when LLMs can business-ify so many spreadsheet processes (whether it's necessary for the business yet or not). And of course with this sort of tool in particular, more eyes seeing "we're paying $x/mo for this service?" naturally leads to "can't we just use our $y/mo LLM to make our own version?". Not sure I'd want to be in small-time b2b right now.
Why are you ignoring the fact that grabbing data from heterogeneous sources, combining it and presenting it is generally never a trivial task? This is exactly what LLMs are good for.
If you are using an LLM to actually fetch that data, combine it, and present it to you in an ad hoc way (like you run the same prompt every month or something), I wouldn't trust that at all. It still hallucinates, invents things and takes short cuts too often.
If you are using an LLM to create an application to grab data from heterogeneous sources, combine it and present it, that is much better, but could also basically be the excel spreadsheet they are describing.
Your knowledge of LLMs is outdated by at least a year. For the past three months at least my team has been one-shotting complex SQL queries that are as semantically correct as your ability to describe them.
And why do you diminish the skill of good data wrangling as if it weren’t the most valuable skill in the vast majority of computer programming jobs? Your cynicism doesn’t correspond with the current ground truth in LLM usage.
Well, that is still having the LLM write code which is more like my second scenario. I use SOTA LLMs for coding literally every day. I don't think my knowledge is "outdated by at least a year".
What if you were just reporting on electric cars then dropped most reporting on electric cars from the foremost electric car company unless there was a way to include ceo-bashing for half the article? I get being fair or even a decent amount of hatred for whatever reason, but Fred really changed his tune and became quite spiteful. It was sad to watch, and many people tried to help in online comments, but seems like the negativity mostly won out.
There are plenty of CEOs who have had this result on trade publications and/or market analysts. The only difference I see is that Musk can be neither thrown out like the majority nor pressured to listen to PR experts who normally spend as many hours as it takes to convince a schmuck like him with a majority stake that being a silent partner shows strength and confidence.
Eventually, people have to get into politics and deal with the BS to make things right. It's hard and thankless, and so far it seems the Left has only been able to get people in who are personally profiting a lot. That's why almost none are willing to rock the boat in a meaningful way, and they get no support. Just like how DOGE failed in getting most of its cost cutting recommendations approved because they were stopped by the Right.
Started by Russia against Ukraine and without active participation of Europe. US literally attacked Iran to support Israel.
If we go by analogies, Ukraine should've waged genocidal war against Belarus and eventually started bombing Russia and then Europe joined and they bombed Russia together.
Trump got so much support because people knew for a long time that the Establishment of mainstream media was switching a lot more towards promoting narratives rather than unbiased journalism. It became worse as paper and TV news was getting replaced by ad-driven clickbait. He called out the previously unquestionable Institutions, and then a lot of people just accepted what he said after that (very simplified).
I think the biggest lever is just what they decide to give airtime to. It's known that humans are extremely moldable by anchoring- whoever they hear from first they are more likely to trust, and repetition- whatever they hear most they are more likely to trust. Key arguments are picked in some weird process I have yet to figure out, and then 90% of prime airtime is going towards whether <1% of the population people should be able to identify as another gender instead of all the real stuff going on that people should be hearing about.
It's just that mobility is still too easy. Anyone with slightly above-average intelligence and a bit of drive can join the oppressors, their arms are wide open. Fraud/corruption is rampant and accepted, all you have to do is open a daycare or homeless shelter and "bend the knee" by claiming some sort of disabled/minority/veteran/woman status. CA has raised over $80 billion for "homeless" and the money is getting spent but very little on the homeless.
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