Just curious, how much did you pay for all that AI analysis?
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Nothing. It’s free. 
← proves the point. https://claude.ai/
This is my chief quandary. Much of the successes are efficiency enablements which do not directly translate to “more products sold” or “jobs cut from the team”. In this respect, the use of AI appears as cost avoidance, holding costs constant and profit constant, but deflationary as the sales revenue is also constant.
For my company, AI is compensating for lost experience and lost capacity in skilled workforce (training, process coaching, etc.) But this trend is NOT directly adding profit.
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Appreciate your snark, McLovin1981. Do elaborate.
Is your company paying a lot for the AI services that it uses? Or are they relying on free or low cost tools?
We are exploring AI in many ways.
We have copilot included services with MSFT as a portion of the overall windows user licenses.
We have tools, models and interfaces that have been built in house on a foundation of SNOW, DataBricks, MSFT Azure, GOOG Gemini and proprietary systems.
We have vendor contracts for supplied services using hardware, software and systems based on the use case.
In almost every case, this is cost avoidance (aspiration) in exchange for “test/trial” contract values.
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What are your top, most value-add use cases, so far, as you best know them?
Of course you can be vague, like “parse pdfs for image content.”
(I don’t want to reveal any top secret, secret sauce.)
The best single example of AI use that is helping is connecting all of our prose-based training materials, standards, work instructions and procedures to a chat-bot. There is no human at our company that can do the integration and reference activity that fast.
In fact, our trainers and senior SMEs are using it MOST. No one was hired, fired or regraded, but not information is flowing more efficiently and effectively.
Next up is a proprietary tool that allows a crayon drawing on a napkin to be instantly compared to relevant products and their best location to produce. This has reduced errors in product placement by 99%
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Or better yet
- AI does not know you are using it.
Jumping in reply to no one to post a link to James Macintosh’s piece in the Wall Street Journal about the potential rewards - and pitfalls - of today’s AI investing. A decent summary, I think:
AI Investors Are Chasing a Big Prize. Here’s What Can Go Wrong.
There are good reasons to think that simply throwing more computing power at the current models won’t do it
The basic principle of venture capital is to put a dollar in each of 10 companies, accept that three will go to zero, one or two to $10 or more, and the rest kind of meh. The winner more than makes up for the losers, but you spread your money around in the hope of securing ten-baggers.Investing in artificial intelligence increasingly has the same mindset—but without the diversification. This leaves investors exposed to all the many risks as they chase one big bet: artificial general intelligence, an AI that can match or surpass humans. This isn’t a chatbot, but a truly capable alternative to the human brain: Think Terminator, Hal, Blade Runner.
If what’s known as AGI ever worked, it would deliver massive societal change, as well as potentially huge productivity gains and, barring state seizure, profits on a literally science-fiction scale. This is the better-than-ten-bagger bet that AI luminaries talk up as they set out plans for trillions of dollars to be sunk into data centers.
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The ETF has a long name - YieldMax Magnificent 7 Fund of Option Income ETFs (YMAG). It occurred to me last week that this could be a great way to play the AI market. After all, the “Magnificent 7” in the title are options in Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook/Meta, Alphabet/Google, Tesla & Nvidia. All 7 companies are involved in AI to a varying degree. As I have noted, and am actively following in another thread, the YMAG ETF switched to a weekly dividend payout. Yes, the weekly payout is lumpy. However, one does get paid on a weekly basis. My current exposure to YMAG is about 2.5% of my self-managed port. But, I think as time progresses (and I continue to get paid 
), and I learn more about YMAG behavior, I could expand my exposure. YMMV
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BTW, just saw this name show up on a list - Fermi, Inc (FRMI) - a Data Center REIT that IPO’d last week. Co-founded by former U.S Energy Secretary, zero revenue, vague business plan and ambitious power target 11 Gigawatt of low-carbon, on demand power
https://seekingalpha.com/news/4500511-rick-perrys-data-center-reit-fermi-prices-at-21-per-share
This one I avoid
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Interesting. Since the fund started 20 months, the return (including all the payouts) has been 57%. That is a CAGR of 31%. Note that it did drop 25% earlier this year between the high in January and the low in early April.
DB2
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@DrBob2- Yes, you may recall that in April 2025, a certain someone made a major proclamation, and the market reacted quite dramatically to the news. Lots of tech names reacted badly to the announcement, including the Mag 7 behemoths. Since mid-May 2025, YMAG has traded within a narrow channel, ~ $14.85 - $16.05, and the 2025 weekly payout has varied from 5c/sh to 29.9c/sh.
Since the April bottom, the total return for YMAG is 53% which is basically the return since the inception of the fund.
My question is what is your strategy with YMAG? There are weekly payouts but they have to be reinvested to get the high returns I mentioned upthread. If you don’t reinvest then the price return has been -22% and the payouts would add 54% for a total of 32%.
Is there an exit signal of some kind?
DB2
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@DrBob2- In my case, I have NOT been reinvesting the dividend back into YMAG. I think the last time I checked my total return for YMAG was in the 25 - 26%. A weekly dividend is a somewhat unusual beast. In the YMAG case, it has only been in play about a year, and I wasn’t quite sure how it would play out. Hence, some reluctance on my part to just jump into a YMAG DRIP right away.
[Edit: I just caught your last question after I posted. So, this is what I call the discovery aspect. Here’s my thinking. As I recall, the low has been 5c. A second consecutive 5c should raise an alarm. And a third 5c should be a “close YMAG position”. Again, the advantage of weekly data shows that across 2025 only three payouts have been under 6c/sh. There was also a month where each of 4 weekly payouts was a little shy of 10c. In any case, since I have an idea of what “low end” payout is, then I have my signal on what should cause me to play closer attention]
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These are likely pyramid schemes. They take new investor money and pay dividends to existing $. They make some money is made in trading options but it is hard to tell how much.
This can end up being profitable but be watchful.
You used AI to generate an enormous volume of output. As we know, AI can hallucinate and make mistakes, so now that enormous output needs to be checked. Did you actually save any time? Cal Newport had a recent blog post relating to this topic:
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The AI evaluation company METR recently released the results of a randomized control trial in which a group of experienced open-source software developers were sorted into two groups, one of which would use AI coding tools to complete a collection of tasks, and one of which would not. As the report summarizes: “Surprisingly, we find that when developers use AI tools, they take 19% longer than without—AI makes them slower.”
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The conclusion is obviously wrong. AI adoption for coding is very fast. AI can now write end to end systems, run jobs, trouble shoot errors and fix them.