Considering that’s a healthy portion of a salary for an additional employee per person, the fact they’re slashing spending sure makes it look like AI wasn’t even a 2x multiplier at minimum.

It’s mostly from people using their personal accounts to run LLM services that serve a larger team or organization. At least at Microsoft, it’s still impressively hard to get access to an LLM for service usage with high enough rate limits to be useful, making running services on dev boxes much more appealing (despite the countless drawbacks that few people seem to care about around security, compliance, reliability, etc).