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CEOs admit AI had no impact on employment or productivity
- expedition32 6mo agoDutch AI would just demand a 3 day workweek.
- jnaina 6mo agoSpanish AI would require all AI systems to pause for 2 hours after lunch hour
- leosanchez 6mo agoAnd not work during LaLiga games ?
- throwuxiytayq 6mo agothey’re holding it wrong.
- tcp_handshaker 6mo agoThey should have asked AI CEOs
- Simulacra 6mo agoThen why the layoffs???
- wildrhythms 6mo agoOutsourcing to India and the Philippines
- cmiles8 6mo agoThere’s alway a bit of that going on, but ironically if AI does result in mass labor replacement India and the Philippines are likely going to be ground zero where workforces get wiped out first. They’re ripe with the kind of things that AI is, in theory, getting very good at.
- plaguuuuuu 6mo agoI've always held the view that successfully using AI requires more knowledge and skill, as the burst radius of poor engineering decisions or lack of domain knowledge is way larger. I just cannot see WITCH doing this without exponentiating the usual problems with outsourcing. I've seen some horrors. Can't wait for contractors wielding unprecedented chaos.
- Simulacra 6mo agoGood point, successfully using AI takes skill. If you'll please pardon me, I don't think your average GenZ knows how to properly use it. It takes someone who grew up with technology, who understands the fundamentals of technology, who understands the fundamentals of computational decision-making, that can really make use of ChatGPT etc. Someone raised on App Tap culture just isn't equipped to fully appreciate the technology. Not that they can't, it's just… The vast majority of them are hopeless with this.
- cmiles8 6mo agoTypical bad management decisions that came home to roost. It’s a lot easier to say “AI productivity improvements” than for the CEO to say “I’m cleaning up terrible performance on my part and a lot of bad business decisions.”
- bilekas 6mo agoBecause there was bloat and AI was a good scape goat.
- advael 6mo agoPartially a contracting real economy following overhiring early in the decade, partially trying to discipline labor, partially a pretty profound disconnect from both market pressures and concrete metrics that comes from a business model more centered around stock value and funding raises than revenue per se
- TheOtherHobbes 6mo agoWe've been moving to faith-based markets for decades - markets where belief and hope almost entirely replace quantifiable economic activity.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- fzeroracer 6mo agoTo juice the next quarter. Extreme short-term thinking has become the norm at every business I've worked at and every business I'm aware of, so upper management has no issue cutting teams right down to the bone. It's why software has become far more unstable. There's nobody around to actually maintain it.
- ivankra 6mo agoTrend following - everyone's jumping. And bad economy.
- coldtea 6mo agoThe economy is shit. They make the layoffs but instead of saying we're scaling down, they present it as AI related productivity gains. Just spin for not exactly bright small time stock holders.
- pragmatic 6mo agoReducing opex to invest more into capex (at least for companies that can like MSFT etc)?
- cyb_ 6mo agoCapital reallocation. In other words, moving money/spend from non-AI projects to AI projects/cost. This includes trimming the bottom X% of performers to reallocate that money too. In most cases, it is not about current productivity or AI doing people's jobs.
- ofjcihen 6mo agoThis article is underlining the stark contrast between the viewpoints of “AI Enthusiasts” and everyone else. Don’t get me wrong, I use these tools daily. That being said I’m having a very hard time finding where the productivity gains are. I imagine I’m far from alone in that search and when you pair that with the constant marketing and glowing “analysis” from some of the enthusiasts about how this technology is “solving coding” or “changing the face of security” or even leading to AGI it starts to tickle that part of my brain where I keep blockchain, NFTs and copper bracelets. So TLDR the tech is good but the hype-slaves and their masters are killing it with overpromising and under delivering.
- bluefirebrand 6mo ago> Don’t get me wrong, I use these tools daily. That being said I’m having a very hard time finding where the productivity gains are I'm really struggling to understand why you would use them that much if you aren't sure they are more productive. Is it just a more enjoyable workflow for you? I ask because I find AI assisted workflows extremely painful. Constantly pulling me out of flow, like driving in gridlock traffic.
- ofjcihen 6mo agoIt allows me to be lazy honestly. That and using it like a search engine feels a little like having good Google back.
- grebc 6mo agoI don’t like the tools personally, and find the reversion of any sort of interface to a chat interface a huge loss to UI - but for the love of all things holy why are using them if they don’t provide any benefit?
- andrekandre 6mo ago> for the love of all things holy why are using them if they don’t provide any benefit? like most tech trends: fomo and hype tbf, there is some benefit there but its much more nuanced than the hype suggests (as usual)
- nothinkjustai 6mo agoDid the hype cycle not have an impact on employment with the various layoffs? Or is this and admission that the layoffs were for other reasons and were just attributed to AI? I’m not surprised about productivity though. Efficiency gains are limited by the actual bottlenecks. And truthfully, I think people are deluding themselves a bit about how effective vibe coding is and how much faster they are actually moving when you consider developers still need to form an understanding of the codebase and its systems. Outside of coding, is there really a use case for LLMs that has the potential to make big efficiency gains? Idk.
- smalltorch 6mo agoI've found the best way for me to wield it is the tool to build tools. I would have never in a million years been able to code. But I've used it to replace things I was paying hefty monthly subscriptions for.... So I'm not actually being more productive, but I've cut my costs significantly to do the same things I could do before.
- slopinthebag 6mo agoI thought I would do this, but of all the vibe coded tools I've built, I think I still use...one. The rest are just not worth the upkeep relative to the utility, or are either broken functionally or in their UX and I can't be arsed to put the effort into making them good. Which brings up why these tools didn't really exist in the first place. Of course ymmv, and if you find yourself paying subscriptions for stuff you can replace with vibe coded apps, all power to you.
- cmiles8 6mo agoAI isn’t going away, but it’s also clear the much promised impacts aren’t there and aren’t coming anytime soon. A bit like the claims a few years back that we’d all have self driving cars by now. The most likely outcome is an AI bubble correction that will be somewhat painful and wipe out many/most AI startups, followed by AI settling into day to day in a way that’s useful and found in many places, but not world-as-we-know-it-ending like the AI bros predict.
- newyankee 6mo agoWE do have self driving cars with Waymo data showing it is clearly better than human drivers in certain markets like Phoenix. It is human regulations, laws and the general societal unease that is preventing a total rapid change. In fact a Robotaxis only urban area which is continuously mapped might be feasible today and probably could even reduce the no of cars needed for the population making it accessible to many more.
- cmiles8 6mo agoAI has the same problem. It’s not that it doesn’t work, but that folks just aren’t all that interested in adopting it at scale. Tech makes this “build it and they will come” error a lot. The tech is quite good, but it’s all the non tech aspects of this that are why it’s not getting impact at scale.
- civvv 6mo agoYou’re generalizing too much here. One of the biggest problems with LLM’s today is in-fact that they are not at the level being advertised. This is not solely a case of regulation standing in the way of a «revolution».
- acdha 6mo agoThe tech is good but not as good as advertised: note how Microsoft is simultaneously running ads saying Copilot can run your business and claiming it’s only for entertainment purposes in the EULA? Self-driving vehicles have a similar struggle where the manufacturers talk about the capabilities but aren’t willing to sign a legal agreement accepting liability for errors except in the easiest situations (and in the case of Waymo, only with pliable governments and control so they could immediately halt operations in the event of a major problem). That’s more “build part of it, say you built all of it, and wonder why they don’t come”.
- prh8 6mo agoMy company has pushed engineering all-in for AI in the last few months Our stock price has also gone down 70% in the last few months Naturally, we're pivoting our platform to put AI front and center
- Grimblewald 6mo agoThe beatings will continue until moral improves
- salawat 6mo agoDon't you mean morale? Businesses are basically amoral by desi....ooooooooh. I see what you did there.
- dehrmann 6mo agoThese aren't related in the way you think they are. Stock price reacts quickly to broader market trends, but more slowly for company-specific trends where revenue is likely stable. The impact of AI in engineering work will take months to show up in the product, probably a year after that for customers and the market to take notice. An AI product is a different thing entirely.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 6mo agoDid they try and be an blockchain-first company when that was the rage? Making NFTs and whatnot. Is your CEO just a trend-follower?
- gozucito 6mo agoI believe the lack of quick evident profit increases are partly a failure of imagination or a failure of understanding that AI agents are different from people. More impressive or faster in some ways, but much much less reliable in others. The evolution of harnesses like claude code or open cause, and metaharnesses like Ralph loops, gas town, claws, etc. Will progressively allow for gradually better results and abilities even if models stopped evolving, and if the Mythos eval numbers are to be believed, there is still no hard ceiling to be felt yet. At the same time, small models that can run on PCs VRAM/UNIFIED RAM have like Qwen are becoming more useful. I predict that having more and more loops within loops within loops and layers of cloud/local models of different capabilities will solve a great many limitations of LLMS today...at the cost of speed and token count. We've never had a tool that is at the same time so unreliable and complicated as GenAI before. It will take us a minute to figure out how to use it properly.
- slopinthebag 6mo agoActually I think the opposite - we will learn that the most important thing is the ability to manage context & steer these models instead of using a rube goldberg machine. Some of the top performing agent harnesses on Terminal Bench provide literally one tool: tmux, which outperforms Claude Code et al. To me, the most important thing by far when getting reasonable output from these machines are what you put into it.
- belZaah 6mo agoUnlikely. There’s no change in operating profit per employee trends for major software companies like Alphabet since GenAI became a thing. But MS employees are now making 3 times more profit, than they were before Nadella took over. Clearly leadership can make a difference but there is no visible impact after several years of the technology being available. I can’t imagine a technology, that shows no economic impact at all while we figure it out. There ought to be _something_. Yes, big companies have inertia, but Nadella showed clear results in a year.
- EPWN3D 6mo agoThat's not apples to apples due to Microsoft's massive force reductions and Azure's massive growth.
- Avicebron 6mo agoI wish anytime someone used the word "productivity" there was an accompanying definition.
- andrekandre 6mo agoits because its all vibes i think its too hard to separate the noise from the signal unless there is some huge differential like 2x profits immediately following ai adoption or a real deep longitudinal study (which no-one pushing this at companies seems to want to do)
- doctaj 6mo agohttps://archive.ph/ztkLP https://archive.ph/ztkLP
- lumost 6mo agoA lot of organizations live in some game theoretic equilibrium that prevents cost improvements from being metabolized by the org without burning the cost elsewhere. For example, consider a commodity business for software product X. All vendors of this product had their costs reduced by a factor of 100 over night for developing new product. They could increase their profits, lower their price, or re-invest the dividend. In software, the buyer usually buys on quality - so they all re-invest. Now they are spending the same amount on product development, for the same price tag, and earning the same profit - but they might be shipping much faster.
- davebren 6mo agoAre businesses all running on sunk cost fallacy now? These findings have been coming out for a while but it doesn't seem to change anything.
- grebc 6mo agoThey’ll say no but really… you know.
- flextheruler 6mo agoIt seems like that because economic bubbles can last a lot longer than just 3 years. We are also in one of the longest credit cycles ever(2009 - Present) which has exacerbated this behavior.
- beloch 6mo agoThere's an interesting race happening here. On one side, there is the usual process of figuring out how to properly use this new tech. It is to be expected that some experimentation is necessary to figure out what applications AI boosts productivity for and what applications it doesn't. There is unusually strong evangelism pushing AI into everything, so the negatives are going to be salient and may make it hard to spot some of the successes. On the other side is something a little bit new: Deliberate enshittification. OpenAI and others no doubt saw the power crunch coming years in advance, yet it's still happening and is, ostensibly, the reason why prices are starting to go up. This was not unexpected. It's the business model. Build to the capacity that is cheaply available while offering your customers a sweetheart deal to get them addicted, and then jack up the prices when the competition has no cheap power to build upon. The result is locked in customers and locked out competition. On one side, you have people learning when AI is appropriate and how to use it efficiently. On the other side, you have a small number of AI companies trying to extract every last bit of value so that any productivity gains wind up in their owners' pockets. Will the gains of more appropriately applying AI be entirely wiped out by enshittification?
- antisthenes 6mo agoAh yes, first the return to office, now being forced to use AI in 50%+ of projects. Will the ingenuity of modern executives never cease?
- 10sunbee 6mo ago[dead]
- ChrisArchitect 6mo agorepost from february; many referencing the same NBER report. Some related discussions recently and months ago: 90% of CEOs Say AI Changed Nothing. The Other 10% Have a PR Team https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47766164 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47766164 Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI splurge https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46696636 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46696636
- ritcgab 6mo agoThey all know that, and we all know that. So we are all in this "scheme".
- charlie90 6mo agoHas anyone studied the converse? Not using AI leading to loss of productivity? I feel like AI is no longer a "gain" but rather simply a requirement to compete.
- jdlshore 6mo agoProductivity gain or loss is in comparison to something else. In the article “using AI” is compared “not using AI.” So, the question is, what converse do you want to study? “Not using AI” compared to what?
- zihotki 6mo agoProductivity per dollar doesn't increase because for maturity levels 1&2 the costs for inference and extra team load (PRs quantity and size) eat up all gains. Only on level 3 one can see actual productivity impact. Most companies are between levels 1 and 2, that's where only costs are rising. Levels: 0 - no AI, 1 - AI enabled (copilots), 2 - AI assisted (autonomous agent pipelines not on your PC) , 3 - AI measured.
- rechargedaily 6mo agoInteresting data point from the other direction — while CEOs see no productivity impact, engineers are feeling the pressure of AI regardless of actual output gains. In our burnout survey, AI pressure to do more has emerged as a top 4 burnout driver in 2026. That finding didn't exist two years ago. So even if AI isn't delivering the productivity CEOs expect, it's still extracting a cost from engineers in the form of heightened expectations and stress. If anyone wants to add their data: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdu-1Sa6oPvhDtFtBuKEgeQ-xIUMTjGdtfRwVLJGibhJUAmOg/viewform https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdu-1Sa6oPvhDtFtBuK... Live results: rechargedaily.co/state-of-burnout-2026