4 ms·

90% of CEOs Say AI Changed Nothing. The Other 10% Have a PR Team

45 points by mooreds 7mo ago

austin-cheney 7mo ago
No surprises. AI is not a technology solution. Its a people solution. It can do work faster, but requires so much more validation. The result is a shift down the funnel with no change in productivity. Since AI accounts cost money per head a 0 increase in productivity is a large net negative for business customers.
marstall 7mo ago
it may be hard to measure, but it's definitely helping everyone who uses it to be more productive in certain aspects of their work. that's clear to me. but it might be, say, 20% more productive in 20% of your workday, or 1000% more productive 2 days per month (the days when that perfect dream spec hits your desk that you can just paste into claude and get a slick working system back), which works out to just 4% more productive overall, or whatever, which is hard to measure with all the noise. in the end companies will pay for these tools because their employees will be demanding them, same as they demand other things that make their workday more pleasant - email, coffee, air conditioning, a conveniently located office, etc. that said, I see the intelligence itself being rapidly commodified/free. the companies that extract rent in the sector will be the ones that effectively bundle and sell corporate-friendly features with the core intelligence - compliance, tracking, productivity, systems integration, authentication, etc. etc. etc. Which is a competency companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, Google already possess, so they are likely to win. Plus a weird Euro variant of course.
josefritzishere 7mo ago
Studies to date suggest an 18% productivity loss from AI use. I think we'are at the point where we can call it a scam.
- anonzzzies 7mo ago
  For code that cannot be true or it somehow amplifies the fact that most programmers were/are terrible anyway and now they can be 10-50x as terrible?
  - josefritzishere 7mo ago
    Ample sources confirm this to be the case. Basically the code quality is so poor the debugging and rework offset all gains into the negative. It's possible that improvements will eventually get those to net positive, but it's not even at net zero yet. https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-...
  - demorro 7mo ago
    Most software engineers are terrible, probably more than half are net negative in the grand scheme. I would argue this extends to most white collar positions. It's not simple to solve.
- scotty79 7mo ago
  Roughly the same was true for computers and internet for years and/or decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
zingababba 7mo ago
It's interesting to me. I've been reading a lot about sycophancy, psychosis, cognitive surrender, epistemic drift/alienation, system 3 thinking etc. and the conclusion I have inevitably come to is AI is subtly mind fucking a LOT of people with NO exceptions. Also, to say it changed nothing is humorous, tell that to all the people laid off.
- baggachipz 7mo ago
  Well, the job losses are blamed on "AI", but we all know that's just a convenient excuse to correct for over-hiring.
  - Ekaros 7mo ago
    Or in general economy that is not the stock market is starting to look more questionable and that it might be time to prepare for leaner times. Bonus for layoffs making stock market look better.
clay_the_ripper 7mo ago
in the first few years of any new technology only highly innovative companies (startups) use it. people still were using punch cards when tape was invented, and still using tape when floppy’s were invented and those were relatively small innovations not requiring substantial changes to the work. AI is another ballgame, this makes me more bullish on it than ever.
- russelldjimmy 7mo ago
  There are new technologies that don’t go anywhere and then there are new technologies that are useful. Built into your post is the assumption that AI is a new technology that is useful because of the comparison to innovative startups that have benefited from the early adoption of useful new technologies. However, there are startups that have bet on the wrong technologies and perished, which is not addressed. This is survivorship bias. So if we’re going to have a serious discussion, we need to talk about both sides before anybody should get convinced about being bullish on it.
- grtteee 7mo ago
  Reasoning by analogy only works if the characteristics that comprise both things are shared in great magnitude. If you really believe that then… lol.
- DerArzt 7mo ago
  We're six years since GPT-3. Any idea when we'll reach AI Nirvana?
BLKNSLVR 7mo ago
The main point I got from this article was the necessity to change "how wet do things" to make them compatible with AI. Where I work, information is spread over a lot of different systems: Slack, Confluence, DevOps, SharePoint, a separate support/ticketing system. It's easier and less time consuming for me, following my current process, to write descriptions, acceptance criteria, and release notes from source material, and then just get AI to tweak the wording a bit, than it is to compile it all into a single "unit" for AI to then do each stage individually as a first pass. If our documentation was more centralised / organised on a single system, then it would work much better. But that migration ain't never gonna happen in a reasonable time frame. I'm working on an ideas or two to compile things temporarily, but that also takes additional time. All these things take time and planning, which is rarely factored in. Just do it! Just use AI! I should also point out that I know a teacher who uses it to greatly improve productivity in writing reports: Give it the main points that should be made about a child's learning, then let the AI write the words that join those bits together. The results have apparently been great, and has taken a fair bit of stress out of the report writing process.
chaudharyt 7mo ago
Some parts of the article makes me feel that it too, is AI generated. Just a smell. "They’re reporting feelings, not findings." "That’s not measurement. That’s decoration."
neversupervised 7mo ago
This is nonsense. I’m sorry. AI will completely upend the workplace and the economy. Whether that’s self evident today in the numbers in the way that we track those numbers, which is based on how things have historically worked, is not relevant. First principles thinking is enough. C’mon. Stop wishing for a future that feels convenient. This is not the world in which we live. Everything will change. Let’s help people accept and react to that.Let’s stop with the comfort talking and false hope.
- fatata123 7mo ago
  [dead]
- grtteee 7mo ago
  lol is that you Sam?
- NorthTheRock 7mo ago
  > C’mon. Stop wishing for a future that feels convenient. This is not the world in which we live. Everything will change. Let’s help people accept and react to that.Let’s stop with the comfort talking and false hope. This is honestly how I feel about the opposite, it sure would be convenient for capital holders if everything changed and they no longer need to pay employees. They really, really want this to be true, and are pushing it as hard as they can despite reality.
baggachipz 7mo ago
It looks like the AI "boom" will be a net-negative for society. So much money spent, so much water and power wasted, so much real estate used... All for a solution in search of a problem. Sure, the president of the United States can create and post an image of his self-proclaimed messianic powers, but that's hardly a productive outcome worth the hullabaloo.
- danny_codes 7mo ago
  IMO this is just what capitalism looks like. We direct resources to whatever seems like it’ll yield the highest returns and force society to eat the externalities. This effect will continue to worsen over time without reform or revolution, until we transition to a more pure oligarchy. Unfortunately the current admin is pro-oligarchy so expect things to worsen in the immediate future
  - grtteee 7mo ago
    People who participate in the stock market (which tends to be many people who may even be anti-capitalist) do so in the hope of generating excess returns. Is this really a function of capitalism or just who humans really are in general? That is to say humans are self interested and desire to maximise their own wealth.
    - danny_codes 7mo ago
      Sure, that’s an observed human behavior. You can also observe altruism, compassion, empathy, etc. Capitalism is designed to force everyone to maximize personal wealth, because wealth determines resource allocation. Other societies did it or do it differently.
      - dsf2aa 7mo ago
        That's nonsense. You do not have to 'maximize' your personal wealth and nobody is forced to do so. Many people choose to do so, voluntarily. That's the essence of free markets. It just so happens capitalism not only complements the notion of free markets, but enables more markets to exist than otherwise. You can't have it both ways.
returnInfinity 7mo ago
Not true after Dec-Feb. Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.4 are real. If you use AI to ship more features, even your competitors are going to use AI to ship more. So is this how we increase productivity? Who captures the value? For now looks like the chip makers and model makers.
- akagusu 7mo ago
  > If you use AI to ship more features, even your competitors are going to use AI to ship more. Unfortunately people didn't learn yet that shipping more features is not equal to increasing revenue which itself is not equal to increasing profits.
  - returnInfinity 7mo ago
    But growth stall, because competitors will capture future growth. You need to keep up. Of course I acknowledge if Hersheys uses AI to make trillions of chocolates a second, there is an upper limit on consumption. And hence a limit on revenue.
    - akagusu 7mo ago
      > But growth stall, because competitors will capture future growth. You need to keep up. You need to keep up if you follow Silicon Valley business model growth + funding = IPO. Every other business in the world needs revenue and profit to keep the business open, and growth does not necessarily translates into revenue and profit.
  - grtteee 7mo ago
    [dead]
sidcool 7mo ago
I do feel AI is an amazing technology. It has indeed lowered the bar in coding, learning and writing. But it's not the Terminator technology the CEOs want us to believe.
pupppet 7mo ago
I mean, how much of this due to employees dicking around while their AI does the work for them. How many will report to their managers they opted to doom scroll rather than use the productivity gains from AI to do more?
Fannon 7mo ago
I'm not surprised if this is true to a wide degree (not fully). What the people that predicted that AI will change productivity drastically in just a year or two imho underestimate: Just because a technology is capable of this in theory (and I think it is, even today) - it doesn't mean we are willing or able to deploy it to its full potential at scale. There will be a few individuals and very few companies which will do so or come close. For most of the companies, they're still doing a lot of processes manually that could have been automated with 80s technology. Why should a change in the technology suddenly make everyone change their mindset, culture, way of thinking? This may take 1-2 generations to more fully form. Maybe that's also better: Slower change is less destablizing for society / individuals, I think of it more like a defensive mechanism of the system to keep it stable.
coolThingsFirst 7mo ago
For the seniors, when you review AI code what percentage would you say it takes you of the time that you'd have needed to write it from scratch? Just curious, i've been thinking about this a lot.
aahad95 7mo ago
I echo similar feelings from the comments. AI is trying to fit into workflows executed by people. and it isnt mature enough for people to trust it blindly yet. so people need to validate it and that is just extra work for some. Till we come to a point AI is good enough to run untethered? or we shift people's mindeset to understand review is essential and makes you more productive anyways. but it cant work the way it is. Also we need to udnerstand just because AI cna be general purposed means it should. the best AI implementations are quite niched and targetted. MS Copilot is shit because it doesnt serve the right purpose at times and thats what most companies think AI is because they have marketted this way

45 points by mooreds 7mo ago

No surprises. AI is not a technology solution. Its a people solution. It can do work faster, but requires so much more validation. The result is a shift down the funnel with no change in productivity. Since AI accounts cost money per head a 0 increase in productivity is a large net negative for business customers.

marstall 7mo ago

it may be hard to measure, but it's definitely helping everyone who uses it to be more productive in certain aspects of their work. that's clear to me. but it might be, say, 20% more productive in 20% of your workday, or 1000% more productive 2 days per month (the days when that perfect dream spec hits your desk that you can just paste into claude and get a slick working system back), which works out to just 4% more productive overall, or whatever, which is hard to measure with all the noise. in the end companies will pay for these tools because their employees will be demanding them, same as they demand other things that make their workday more pleasant - email, coffee, air conditioning, a conveniently located office, etc. that said, I see the intelligence itself being rapidly commodified/free. the companies that extract rent in the sector will be the ones that effectively bundle and sell corporate-friendly features with the core intelligence - compliance, tracking, productivity, systems integration, authentication, etc. etc. etc. Which is a competency companies like Salesforce, Microsoft, Google already possess, so they are likely to win. Plus a weird Euro variant of course.

josefritzishere 7mo ago

Studies to date suggest an 18% productivity loss from AI use. I think we'are at the point where we can call it a scam.

anonzzzies 7mo ago
For code that cannot be true or it somehow amplifies the fact that most programmers were/are terrible anyway and now they can be 10-50x as terrible?
- josefritzishere 7mo ago
  Ample sources confirm this to be the case. Basically the code quality is so poor the debugging and rework offset all gains into the negative. It's possible that improvements will eventually get those to net positive, but it's not even at net zero yet. https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-...
- demorro 7mo ago
  Most software engineers are terrible, probably more than half are net negative in the grand scheme. I would argue this extends to most white collar positions. It's not simple to solve.
scotty79 7mo ago
Roughly the same was true for computers and internet for years and/or decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox

zingababba 7mo ago

It's interesting to me. I've been reading a lot about sycophancy, psychosis, cognitive surrender, epistemic drift/alienation, system 3 thinking etc. and the conclusion I have inevitably come to is AI is subtly mind fucking a LOT of people with NO exceptions. Also, to say it changed nothing is humorous, tell that to all the people laid off.

baggachipz 7mo ago
Well, the job losses are blamed on "AI", but we all know that's just a convenient excuse to correct for over-hiring.
- Ekaros 7mo ago
  Or in general economy that is not the stock market is starting to look more questionable and that it might be time to prepare for leaner times. Bonus for layoffs making stock market look better.

clay_the_ripper 7mo ago

in the first few years of any new technology only highly innovative companies (startups) use it. people still were using punch cards when tape was invented, and still using tape when floppy’s were invented and those were relatively small innovations not requiring substantial changes to the work. AI is another ballgame, this makes me more bullish on it than ever.

russelldjimmy 7mo ago
There are new technologies that don’t go anywhere and then there are new technologies that are useful. Built into your post is the assumption that AI is a new technology that is useful because of the comparison to innovative startups that have benefited from the early adoption of useful new technologies. However, there are startups that have bet on the wrong technologies and perished, which is not addressed. This is survivorship bias. So if we’re going to have a serious discussion, we need to talk about both sides before anybody should get convinced about being bullish on it.
grtteee 7mo ago
Reasoning by analogy only works if the characteristics that comprise both things are shared in great magnitude. If you really believe that then… lol.
DerArzt 7mo ago
We're six years since GPT-3. Any idea when we'll reach AI Nirvana?

BLKNSLVR 7mo ago

The main point I got from this article was the necessity to change "how wet do things" to make them compatible with AI. Where I work, information is spread over a lot of different systems: Slack, Confluence, DevOps, SharePoint, a separate support/ticketing system. It's easier and less time consuming for me, following my current process, to write descriptions, acceptance criteria, and release notes from source material, and then just get AI to tweak the wording a bit, than it is to compile it all into a single "unit" for AI to then do each stage individually as a first pass. If our documentation was more centralised / organised on a single system, then it would work much better. But that migration ain't never gonna happen in a reasonable time frame. I'm working on an ideas or two to compile things temporarily, but that also takes additional time. All these things take time and planning, which is rarely factored in. Just do it! Just use AI! I should also point out that I know a teacher who uses it to greatly improve productivity in writing reports: Give it the main points that should be made about a child's learning, then let the AI write the words that join those bits together. The results have apparently been great, and has taken a fair bit of stress out of the report writing process.

chaudharyt 7mo ago

Some parts of the article makes me feel that it too, is AI generated. Just a smell. "They’re reporting feelings, not findings." "That’s not measurement. That’s decoration."

neversupervised 7mo ago

This is nonsense. I’m sorry. AI will completely upend the workplace and the economy. Whether that’s self evident today in the numbers in the way that we track those numbers, which is based on how things have historically worked, is not relevant. First principles thinking is enough. C’mon. Stop wishing for a future that feels convenient. This is not the world in which we live. Everything will change. Let’s help people accept and react to that.Let’s stop with the comfort talking and false hope.

fatata123 7mo ago
[dead]
grtteee 7mo ago
lol is that you Sam?
NorthTheRock 7mo ago
> C’mon. Stop wishing for a future that feels convenient. This is not the world in which we live. Everything will change. Let’s help people accept and react to that.Let’s stop with the comfort talking and false hope. This is honestly how I feel about the opposite, it sure would be convenient for capital holders if everything changed and they no longer need to pay employees. They really, really want this to be true, and are pushing it as hard as they can despite reality.

baggachipz 7mo ago

It looks like the AI "boom" will be a net-negative for society. So much money spent, so much water and power wasted, so much real estate used... All for a solution in search of a problem. Sure, the president of the United States can create and post an image of his self-proclaimed messianic powers, but that's hardly a productive outcome worth the hullabaloo.

danny_codes 7mo ago
IMO this is just what capitalism looks like. We direct resources to whatever seems like it’ll yield the highest returns and force society to eat the externalities. This effect will continue to worsen over time without reform or revolution, until we transition to a more pure oligarchy. Unfortunately the current admin is pro-oligarchy so expect things to worsen in the immediate future
- grtteee 7mo ago
  People who participate in the stock market (which tends to be many people who may even be anti-capitalist) do so in the hope of generating excess returns. Is this really a function of capitalism or just who humans really are in general? That is to say humans are self interested and desire to maximise their own wealth.
  - danny_codes 7mo ago
    Sure, that’s an observed human behavior. You can also observe altruism, compassion, empathy, etc. Capitalism is designed to force everyone to maximize personal wealth, because wealth determines resource allocation. Other societies did it or do it differently.
    - dsf2aa 7mo ago
      That's nonsense. You do not have to 'maximize' your personal wealth and nobody is forced to do so. Many people choose to do so, voluntarily. That's the essence of free markets. It just so happens capitalism not only complements the notion of free markets, but enables more markets to exist than otherwise. You can't have it both ways.

returnInfinity 7mo ago

Not true after Dec-Feb. Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.4 are real. If you use AI to ship more features, even your competitors are going to use AI to ship more. So is this how we increase productivity? Who captures the value? For now looks like the chip makers and model makers.

akagusu 7mo ago
> If you use AI to ship more features, even your competitors are going to use AI to ship more. Unfortunately people didn't learn yet that shipping more features is not equal to increasing revenue which itself is not equal to increasing profits.
- returnInfinity 7mo ago
  But growth stall, because competitors will capture future growth. You need to keep up. Of course I acknowledge if Hersheys uses AI to make trillions of chocolates a second, there is an upper limit on consumption. And hence a limit on revenue.
  - akagusu 7mo ago
    > But growth stall, because competitors will capture future growth. You need to keep up. You need to keep up if you follow Silicon Valley business model growth + funding = IPO. Every other business in the world needs revenue and profit to keep the business open, and growth does not necessarily translates into revenue and profit.
- grtteee 7mo ago
  [dead]

sidcool 7mo ago

I do feel AI is an amazing technology. It has indeed lowered the bar in coding, learning and writing. But it's not the Terminator technology the CEOs want us to believe.

pupppet 7mo ago

I mean, how much of this due to employees dicking around while their AI does the work for them. How many will report to their managers they opted to doom scroll rather than use the productivity gains from AI to do more?

Fannon 7mo ago

I'm not surprised if this is true to a wide degree (not fully). What the people that predicted that AI will change productivity drastically in just a year or two imho underestimate: Just because a technology is capable of this in theory (and I think it is, even today) - it doesn't mean we are willing or able to deploy it to its full potential at scale. There will be a few individuals and very few companies which will do so or come close. For most of the companies, they're still doing a lot of processes manually that could have been automated with 80s technology. Why should a change in the technology suddenly make everyone change their mindset, culture, way of thinking? This may take 1-2 generations to more fully form. Maybe that's also better: Slower change is less destablizing for society / individuals, I think of it more like a defensive mechanism of the system to keep it stable.

coolThingsFirst 7mo ago

For the seniors, when you review AI code what percentage would you say it takes you of the time that you'd have needed to write it from scratch? Just curious, i've been thinking about this a lot.

aahad95 7mo ago

I echo similar feelings from the comments. AI is trying to fit into workflows executed by people. and it isnt mature enough for people to trust it blindly yet. so people need to validate it and that is just extra work for some. Till we come to a point AI is good enough to run untethered? or we shift people's mindeset to understand review is essential and makes you more productive anyways. but it cant work the way it is. Also we need to udnerstand just because AI cna be general purposed means it should. the best AI implementations are quite niched and targetted. MS Copilot is shit because it doesnt serve the right purpose at times and thats what most companies think AI is because they have marketted this way