"AI hasn't saved us a single tenge yet": a business owner's honest breakdown

Serik Tolukpayev, owner of a major Kazakhstani business, said in a long interview something you rarely hear from a conference stage: "AI hasn't saved us a single tenge yet." The company keeps experimenting, but turning those experiments into a savings line in the P&L has not happened — and the entrepreneur says so plainly, alongside reflections on the "curse of survival" and failed attempts to step out of day-to-day operations.

Such honesty is more useful than triumphant slide decks: it shows that a gap between hype and the balance sheet is the norm, not a sign of backwardness. Generic AI is an assistant for conversations; economics appear when the technology is assigned a specific process with a measurable cost — handling a request, checking a document, preparing a report.

A practical move for anyone who recognizes themselves here: pick one process, price its current cost in hours and tenge, and only then put an AI agent on it — not "playing with a chatbot" but handing over the task end to end: assign, remind, report the result. That is how task work is built in 1Cifer — the agent does not advise, it carries the task to completion, which is why its contribution shows up in numbers rather than impressions.