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- Professional services AI speeds up drafting and analysis in legal, accounting and consulting work. It also makes confident mistakes, and the firm still answers for them. The documented failures in this sector are all about work nobody checked.
- Agencies Clients can now do part of an agency’s work themselves, and some say so in public. AI speeds up copy, images and translation. No published study yet measures what it does to an agency’s results. Studies of freelance platforms show buyers stopped paying for short writing and translation jobs.
- E-commerce and retail The best-documented gains in retail come from narrow, high-volume tasks: product data, translation and routine support questions. The documented setbacks come from customer-facing AI that was judged on cost or left unchecked.
- Manufacturing Checkable evidence from the factory floor exists but is thin. Two field studies measured AI in quality work, at Siemens and at Hitachi Energy, both large companies. Most other figures on maintenance, quality and engineering are the companies’ own.
Most rigorous studies of AI at work cover a task, such as writing or customer support, and not a sector. Company size often matters more than sector: see AI-first by company size.