Is AI so effective to replace knowledge workers?
It's the summer of 2026. Is AI really cheaper than humans or is it an outright lie? People said AI models be improving, becoming ten times more efficient and cheaper, but what is the reality? What can we really expect in 2027, for example?
There seems to be a bit of an odd relation between its value and cost. Building a model and setting up a data center is horrifically expensive, so LLMs as a service have to be just as expensive. But the stuff that can be done by LLMs is low stakes, low thought work, like copy writing, chatbot customer service answering the same 30 FAQs but crashing out on anything else, summarizing this morning's headlines, etc. The price on these things is still being hashed out but it's looking a lot like using AI is like hiring Anthropic for $100,000/yr. to replace a person who only gets paid $45,000/yr.
As a programmer: HELL NO!
The fact that companies are now telling their employees to scale back and be mindful of their token usage shows that it’s not cheaper. It can be efficient yes, usually for automating the mundane stuff, but it’s not cheaper.
Right now, the state of the art appears to be that LLM's are far more expensive to run than humans for many tasks. So, yeah, it is a lie.
There are uses for specialty AI that seem to work well, but they are usually bespoke for a certain task.
I expect that, if AI is used in 2027, it is going to be used with a lot more intent in targeted uses. I also expect some companies are going to realize it is better to fully control their own AI on their own hardware than to use a more state of the art AI which will use all their data as training data.
LLMs cannot do anything new.
Fuck no, it is a lie. It is like an actor pretending to be a knowledge worker which fools people who don't know better or who want to believe the lie.
Remember, it just regurgitates what it is fed plus some randomization and it can't come up with novel ideas based on experience. That is what knowledge workers are for, applying knowledge to novel situations.
I like to call AI the next gen search engine, but be careful of some things:
you're much easier to track and profile
you may be fed false information easier without context of source information
you're killing the planet
hallucinations
That makes it something other than a search engine, not a new version of one.
I disagree.
I can go into chatgpt and search for landscaping companies near me. It will link them.
I can search for a recipe.
I can search for anything I would normally use a search engine for with much faster speeds.
If that's not searching, I don't know what you mean.
Google and Bing return the results instantly for me.
Is chatgpt twice as instant?
Ya with their AI things. For example, of you dont HSE their AI things, searching for a recipe yields you results of said recipe. Click on it. Then you have to scroll though a bunch of bullshit about their family recipe and how it tastes, then they should you the ingredients. Then the sizing. Then the instructions.
Do the same on an AI assistant and its just text of the recipe and steps no bullshit.
One of these is improved over the other.
Recipes are something I rarely take the first result for, since they can vary widely for the same dish.
Do you care what website it came from?
Have you ever checked to see if it actually matches the source page recipe?
Recipes are something that I always check a couple sites for to look for consistency or variation and some cooking sites are better than others.
Yes I care what the source site is, that's why you can check sources in chatgpt. Anyways its only one example, and I'm not defending AI here, my argument is that they are basically improved search engines. What is a search engine, you might need to ask yourself. You query, something responds.
Considering they're raising the prices of it significantly, I'm gonna say no it's not cheaper.
It's quite good for any problem that nobody cares about. For example, if you have a boss who wants hourly status-updates but does not actually read the updates. Or if you need to fill out security forms, but you were going to lie on all the forms and trust that nobody reads them. Or if you get a bonus for writing >100k lines of code, but the code doesn't need to do anything that people want. Or if you need to have someone answer customer-support questions, but it doesn't matter if the customers get helped or are happy.
Best description ever.
If my experience with it at work is anything to go by, no. Increasing amounts of my time are spent fixing the sloppy output of coworkers who use AI. Far from being "left behind" I've become one of the few people who is actually able to solve complicated problems.
There was a great example of the issue with AI when compared to skilled workers.
There was a company that needed a special function in their software, they wrote it in four weeks and it worked fine.
Then they hired an AI pilled CTO, and needed to write a very similar function to the previous one, only this time, the CTO demanded to save time with AI.
The second function took months of testing to be production ready, and was still far more buggy than the first one, even a year or two later they still had issues with it.
I work at a company with AI-pilled management, they push hard for copilot, and I have noticed that the admin center for Copilot in Microsoft 365 has an overview screen where it has stats, and one of the stats is "hours saved with copilot".
I would LOVE to see how those stats are calculated, they are probably extremely vauge and highly inflated.
The hours saved are likely calculated with Copilot. Just more Microslop.
I wouldn't be surprised if they just make the assumption that any time spent in Copilot means that the user saved at least that amount of time, if not more.
This exactly. We have one or two people, who are supposed to be more technician level people who have started submitting thousands and thousands of lines of code for "features" they dreamed up and which aren't on any backlog or roadmap, and the actual software team is just like "fuck off we don't have time for this." They aren't actually contributing, they are just causing drama at this point.
speaking of which, it seems to me that over time one person will check the work of 3 to 5+ AI agents, when most people are fired, do you think it will be damn hard for the remaining people to work?
I don't think my colleagues are going to be replaced by ai. I think they are going to continue to use llms to generate "output" that needs someone like me to constantly fix until that becomes too expensive. At which point they will go back to doing their work the way they used to.
These llms are impressive word guessing machines, but the are nowhere near as capable as their companies say they are.
The price of using these LLMs is already outpacing what it costs to hire a developer.
And their output is generally trash.
Nope.
“Do the thing. I have a script that does the thing. I made it by listing the things in excel and asking Claude to write a script that does all the things”
The script not only doesn’t run, but it also quietly doesn’t do parts, and breaks stuff too.
So now I’ve got a pile of code that doesn’t work and it would be faster if I’d written it myself than troubleshooting the spaghetti. It’s like having a dumb intern, except the intern is incapable of improvement.
Cheaper, prolly
Efficient? Debatable.
Reliable? Nowhere close, and humans aren't even all that reliable.
Cheaper? No.
Efficient? No.
Reliable? God no.
That doesn't stop the parasite class from viewing AI as a hammer, and every task as a nail... or spending trillions failing upwards.
It's gotten much more expensive in the past month after AI companies changed their pricing models. They still aren't making money, so expect the price to be jacked up in 2027 as well.
I think eventually we'll reach a price point where companies will realize it's only worth it at certain tasks in certain situations. They're not gonna want to shell out serious cash so middle managers can have their emails written and read by computers.
Yeah, there is a reckoning on the horizon. From what i am able to see, the only area where LLMs make sense seems to be testing for security issues in software. There might be some edge cases, like small models for generating in-universe dialogue in games, but we should really prepare for OpenAI and Anthropic and all the AI startups depending on them to crash and burn, taking billions of dollars with them. The only one here profiting are Nvidia, SK Hynix, Micron and Samsung - because they are the people selling the pickaxes and shovels to the fools digging for gold.
In 2027 we can probably expect vastly larger bills or reduced usage limits. The price at which some models are being offered right now is in no way sustainable. For example Anthropics subscription plan gives you tons of quota for the most expensive models, while costing relatively little. Github Copilot recently changed its billing to token-based (before it was request-based) and it already produces incredible bills within the company I work for.
In 2026 you still need expert knowledge to be able to judge whether it's actually generating statements that match reality or just happen to take on a truthy shape.
Web search went from being the most powerful tool in acquiring knowledge to being mostly useless, a crapshoot, because of the difficulty in discerning which articles are useful versus which ones just take on a useful shape.
Interesting... pair this with current state of reading comprehension in the North America education system.... things are gonna be fuuuuucked.
According to AI Bros, yes.
According to a survey of 782 I&O managers conducted in November and December of 2025 by Gartner, less the 30% work as sold.
https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/04/07/only-28-of-ai-infrastructure-projects-fully-pay-off/5221652
No, at minimum you still need area experts to babysit the AI. And also to babysit the people who abuse AI way beyond their skill level.
Right now AI companies are doing what they used to say drug dealers do "Hey it's free! Why don't you give it a try?" And once you get hooked they jack up the price.
In all my years I've never come across someone giving away free street drugs, but AI companies do it all the time. The problem is once the funding dries up, I suspect the real price of some of these services is going to be astronomical. They are giving away millions, if not billions of dollars of services free or deeply discounted all in the hopes of "gaining market share".
When the bubble pops we will likely start seeing the actual cost of some of these services.
Mix in the fact that if you've ever used some of these AI services you'll find most of the time you have to babysit the LLM to give you what you want and not go all haywire on you.
With our current level of technology I think we are in a place where we are only really able to augment some of our workers workflow. I really can't see replacing the full staff of a large to mid-sized company considering the cost and efficiency of these products.
That said I think the genie is out of the bottle, and AI services are here for good. What the landscape will look like in the next few years I really can't say. More people/companies may choose to run LLM's locally on their own machines/servers trained on very specific use cases as that might be more cost effective than what our current generation entails.
I wouldn't expect it to replace people. It will make workers more productive. However, because it is already pretty well spread through most companies, those productivity gains will only lead to competitive advantages for companies with highly skilled workers.
Think of it like a chainsaw for lumberjacks. A lumberjack with a chainsaw is going to be far more productive than one with just a hand axe. But since every company equips their lumberjacks with chainsaws, they aren't really at an advantage, chainsaws are now just a cost of entry for a company. Also, lumberjacks are required to know how to use a chainsaw. But they are ok.
For knowledge workers, AI is our new chainsaw. We're going to learn to use it. And it's going to be part of our jobs going forward. From my own experience, it has it's uses and is pretty good at certain tasks. It can also be endlessly frustrating at tasks where it's not well suited or the training isn't up to snuff. We just have to learn and adjust to a world where the tool exists and is used everywhere. The genie isn't going back in the bottle.
AI is less a chainsaw that it is a guide-wire.
It doesn't accelerate the actual work. It provides a fairly elaborate way to do an adjacent task, which is still entirely dependent on the actual work being done correctly.
Knowledge work is a lot more like a professional restaurant chef than it cutting down trees.