Do they get ROI from additional workers? Honestly it is difficult for me to imagine white collar companies that have positive marginal profit of labor but not positive marginal profit of tokens, especially in the future.
Considering the massive layoffs and cold market post COVID, the answer is "no" for a lot of companies.
Theoretically, there's a lot of room for marginal work where developer time isn't worth the cost for the output but tokens are cheap enough to make it worthwhile. Very little of that work ends up being customer facing though, so it isn't actually a growth opportunity for the company.
Well... Elon showed with Twitter that there's probably a large number of companies out there that have had negative ROI on employees too for a long time. Most companies would be hard pressed to show concrete value from each marginal employee.
Theoretically, there's a lot of room for marginal work where developer time isn't worth the cost for the output but tokens are cheap enough to make it worthwhile. Very little of that work ends up being customer facing though, so it isn't actually a growth opportunity for the company.