[WarmWash]

>why so many companies are now saying they see zero ROI from AI efforts.

I strongly suspect this is because workers are pocketing the gains for themselves. Report XYZ usually takes a week to write. It now takes a day. The other 4 days are spent looking busy.

The MIT report that found all these companies were getting nowhere with AI, also found that almost every worker was using AI almost daily. But using their personal account rather than the corporate one.

[onionisafruit]

If that were the case, this site and certain subreddits would have a lot of posts and comments with people crowing about how much time they are getting back. I haven’t seen that, but I haven’t gone looking for it either.

[butterbomb]

> people crowing about how much time they are getting back

Trust me, if it wasn’t for RTO, I probably would be lol.

[everforward]

While not dispositive of your idea, I think some portion of people using their personal accounts is because we collectively lack good feedback loops on the effectiveness of “AI addons” like RAG. The corporate accounts can be legitimately less useful than a “stock” account because the AI team integrates everything under the sun to show value, but the integrations become a net negative.

Ie ones that index entire company wikis. It ends up regurgitating rejected or not implemented RFCs, or docs from someone’s personal workflow that requires setting up a bunch of stuff locally to work, or etc.

A lot of tasks are not dependent on internal documentation, and it just ends up polluting the context with irrelevant, outdated or just wrong information.

[adithyassekhar]

Quiet the contrary, companies layoff all roles (frontend, backend, qa, devops, even ui/ux) and handle a project to one competent dev. And asks them to deliver it in 1/3rd the time it would have took with a proper team. It's happening at places I know. This thread on reddit is 100% same: https://www.reddit.com/r/developersIndia/s/EIksvB15tm

I can't even imagine the stress from context switching, and since people don't realize this is still work, they do this late into the night as well.

[bluGill]

Every downturn you see the same thing - mass layoffs blamed on whatever the latest fad is. In the end it was the economy not the fad.

When it isn't the economy the gains are used to build more / better, not get rid of people. (not all fads have real gains, but when they do)

[WarmWash]

SWE's are a minority of the white collar workforce.

[beachtaxidriver]

Because the amount of ai slop code from peers and the amount of ai slop emails to read from management has exploded.

[toraway]

That’s certainly a … convenient … explanation.