I know a very specific use case in management consulting where hours spent by a consultant for a repetitive task (mainly report writing and source data gathering) went from on average of 40 hours to 12 hours per project. It costs the firm roughly ~$150 in token spend to save those 28 hours. They used to be roughly $200/hr (so $5k~$6k).

That's about as hard of data as you can get.

An agent found a SQL optimization that at least a month of eng effort hadn't found.

Agents accelerated rollout of a data model change by at least 2 months of eng effort.

Those unblocked a $100k/month infra downsizing. That 2 months pays for my team's AI spend for the year.

Unfortunately not everything will cleanly show up in PnL, which is a function of the entire company’s processes.

If developers are shipping more code (and most of the enablement is in software right now) does that show up in top line? Maybe… if sales and marketing are also selling more, and product people are building the right thing, and…

It’s not a straight line from AI -> $$$

Can’t share more than that publicly. Just that the time saved on this one thing alone is saving us way more money than the subscription per employee that is needed (~100$). I don’t doubt there are companies where this is not the case. Would like to share more details, but the rough math of doing something in a day vs several days + engineering salary have to do here.

> And what revenue and/or profit increases can you cite publicly as a result of the use of AI in this work?

Nobody even tries to measure this. Their CEOs and board members have AI shares, and potential investors need to see your AI story to justify your valuation. It's a prison of lies.

Unfortunately we're at the mercy of Goodhart's law and in an interesting twist, AI is really good with things that have an immediate feedback mechanism, eg writing code that doesn't compile or pass tests, but you're trying to grade AI o something that doesn't have an immediate feedback mechanism. AI can slop out a PowerPoint deck in a fraction of the time it used to take a human by hand. The competent human then goes in and unslopifies it, but overall, still time is saved. Unfortunately, that employee is salaried and not hourly, so they can't click out early and even if they were, what's their incentive to clock out early if it means less money in their pocket? Or they can use the hours now free on something else. My gut, as an Internet random who's used AI is that it helps. I don't know how to measure it, just like how do you measure how much better it is to live in a clean house vs a cluttered one? How would you put that in a metric? If you can't put that into a metric, why bother cleaning your house? We clean it anyway, because of a certain je ne sais quoi.

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