They ask for AI. They pay people to retype things.

Across 274,676 posts from business communities, AI is discussed four times more often than the manual work it is supposed to eliminate. 27,336 mentions against 6,714.

We did not believe that when we first ran it, because a third of the corpus is Hacker News and Hacker News discusses AI the way other forums discuss the weather. So we removed it entirely.

Still 3.2 to 1. In the Reddit business communities on their own, 2.5 to 1. It is not an artefact of the platform mix.

Then we read what the manual work is

A law firm with five attorneys and two paralegals, each tracking their time in a separate spreadsheet, reconciled irregularly by hand. An ecommerce business turning over seven figures, still forwarding orders to its fulfilment partner one at a time and chasing tracking numbers by email.

Neither of those is an AI problem. They are software problems, and they have been software problems since about 1996. What both businesses need is for two systems to talk to each other and for a record to exist in one place.

Why the gap is useful instead of annoyingThe distance between what people ask for and what would actually help them is the most reliable commercial signal we know of. It is not that the askers are wrong. A business owner is not obliged to diagnose their own operations. It is that the request arrives in the vocabulary of whatever is currently being discussed, and the underlying problem is usually older, duller and far more tractable than the vocabulary suggests.

This is a keyword count, not a semantic one, and it treats a post saying we do not use AI as a mention of AI. That cuts against the finding rather than for it, and the direction survives it.