Thread

1. bunderbunder · 1790711630 · focus · HN ↗

   They talk a bit about where the AI companies are supposed to get their revenue from. I’d like to see these analyses go a step further and talk about how those AI customers are supposed to come up with that money as well.

   For example, the article suggests $1T from enterprise productivity tooling. A quick Google suggests the global enterprise productivity tooling market is only worth about $0.1T right now.

   Do we really expect all the world’s corporations to suddenly up their annual spend by 1,000% on average? Why?

   1. Legend2440 · 1790712395 · focus · HN ↗

      Keep in mind wealth is not a fixed thing. If AI makes their businesses more productive, it would allow the creation of more wealth, giving them more money to pay for AI with.

      This of course hinges on the big if: does AI create wealth? I think yes, but maybe not $6 trillion of it in five years.

      1. bunderbunder · 1790714104 · focus · HN ↗

         But that's where the "Why?" comes in.

         At a time when corporate CEOs are largely saying that they can't see that AI has improved office productivity at all, why should we believe that a killer productivity application of genai that's amazing enough to justify an order of magnitude increase in enterprise spending on productivity tools is just around the corner?

         1. strulovich · 1790714353 · focus · HN ↗

            Are they saying it right now?

            I think CEOs could honestly say it a year ago, but by now the numbers of those who say so should be dwindling.

            Recent surveys by BCG and others suggest things have changed.

            Personally, I know many people in different fields who’ve seen crazy speed ups in many of their tasks.

            1. ForHackernews · 1790714712 · focus · HN ↗

               But does crazy speedup of tasks actually yield more productivity? Or does it yield greater numbers of pointless tasks?

               Anecdotally, I've seen management using AI to produce more and more flashy looking dashboards and interactive displays of various metrics. Will this help our bottom line?

               1. apelapan · 1790716307 · focus · HN ↗

                  If management spends their idle time building dashboards by themselves instead of taking up developer time asking for dashboards to be built and populated for them, there might be productivity to be had...

                  1. bunderbunder · 1790725028 · focus · HN ↗

                     Absolutely not. A big chunk of my last job was figuring out ways to gently help managers understand that some dashboard or report they built was producing incorrect numbers because they didn’t get the data munging quite right, or fundamentally misunderstood what some field was measuring.

                     AI made it worse because LLMs will instantly give a confidently wrong answer where previously that moment of uncertainty might have led to a conversation with the data’s custodian.

               2. FridgeSeal · 1790723406 · focus · HN ↗

                  I’ve watched my work go absolutely ballistic for AI-ing all the things.

                  Lots of code gets written, that much is certain. A lot of slopped out PowerPoint presentations which are just worse to read than human-written ones. We have _not_ magically accelerated delivery times and the product which is 99% vibe-coded perpetually has “oh that’s weird” bugs. An obscene amount of effort is being poured into internal tooling, 90% of which is reinventing existing tooling. Important to note that the internal tooling isn’t actually usable or helpful in building the product, but we are pouring eye watering amounts of cash into it.

            2. bunderbunder · 1790715240 · focus · HN ↗

               The latest BCG report I saw on this was the one from this summer that found that employees are saying they're saving time, but businesses still haven't figured out how to turn that into dollars.

               And employees self-reporting that they saved time doesn't necessarily mean they actually save time. Humans are famously crap at estimating that sort of thing.

               1. bluefirebrand · 1790718326 · focus · HN ↗

                  [dead]

               2. fy20 · 1790737481 · focus · HN ↗

                  The same report said 67% of regular AI users have increased job satisfaction, so that has value. Even from an entirely capitalist mindset you cannot argue that increased satisfaction = increased wellbeing = less time on sick leave = increased productivity.

                  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bcg.com&#x2F;press&#x2F;3june2026-ai-reshaping-jobs-faster-than-companies-reshaping-work" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bcg.com&#x2F;press&#x2F;3june2026-ai-reshaping-jobs-faster...

                  1. bootsmann · 1790746042 · focus · HN ↗

                     Less time on sick leave would be measurable…
                  2. bunderbunder · 1790786077 · focus · HN ↗

                     I&#x27;d want to know a lot more about how they get that number before trying to extrapolate it to a general business trend. There could be a huge self-selection bias there. Perhaps people who enjoy using AI are significantly more likely to become regular AI users. In which case, what that statistic really says might only be, &quot;People who like a thing report that they enjoy using it.&quot;

                     You also have to be careful about the Hawthorne Effect. It&#x27;s quite common for workplace interventions to produce improved productivity measures that are illusory or fleeting because what workers are really responding to is the novelty of the change or the simple fact that they know they&#x27;re being observed.

                     Which doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean that the benefits people are seeing right now aren&#x27;t real. Just that, again, it may not translate to a sustained financial benefit that would justify a meaningful contribution to a global $6T&#x2F;year rate of AI spending.

            3. trashface · 1790715930 · focus · HN ↗

               Maybe they are speeding up things that were not the bottleneck or don&#x27;t matter. Or LLMs speed up the time to learn, &quot;well this idea probably sucks actually&quot;, which is great, but in the end there is still no good idea. For software dev, it had already gotten pretty efficient before LLMs came around - the business of making software demanded it. There are still gains to be had no doubt, but many will have less impact.

               I&#x27;m using claude to make gaming mod apps I never would have bothered to code before, but they have zero monetizable value. There is demand for sure, but somewhat ironically, copyright&#x2F;IP&#x2F;TOS law stands in the way. The thing which committed the biggest copyright infringement in human history lets me make another thing which I can&#x27;t release because of copyright law. I&#x27;d get cease-and-desisted instantly if I did so.

               1. eurhe · 1790718480 · focus · HN ↗

                  Correct framing.

                  Many here are idiotic. Economic growth is measured via monetisation of output - not what you think is of value to you.

               2. bunderbunder · 1790724389 · focus · HN ↗

                  For my part I’ve seen it actually slowing down time to decide ideas suck. It’s reduced the friction to start implementing so much that people are just diving in before they’ve even had a chance to fully bake the idea. At which point they’re likely to get stuck on Mr Sunk Cost’s Wild Ride.

                  Management doesn’t see the problem because they are still completely distracted trying to measure dev team productivity in story points or KLOC instead of something meaningful like USD.

         2. Legend2440 · 1790717836 · focus · HN ↗

            I don&#x27;t really care what CEOs say - most of them are, for lack of a better word, idiots. They&#x27;re all MBAs that wouldn&#x27;t know a revolutionary technology from a hole in the ground.

            I see how useful AI tools are for myself and can&#x27;t imagine it not changing the world over the next few decades.

            1. eurhe · 1790718369 · focus · HN ↗

               Are you putting your money where your mouth is and creating a startup then?

               If not then a) don’t diss the mba folks b) you don’t have as much conviction as you claim c) if you are then send a link so I can review?

               Cheers

               1. FridgeSeal · 1790726720 · focus · HN ↗

                  Oopsy, MBA-holder detected!!

                  Simply holding an overrated degree doesn’t instantly guarantee that their opinions and skills are “worthwhile” or “good”.

            2. bunderbunder · 1790727266 · focus · HN ↗

               GenAI is revolutionary.

               GenAI is difficult to monetize.

               Two things can be true at the same time.

               For example, I helped build a specialized GenAI product that disrupted its niche and unseated the incumbent market leader. It was also, as of when I left the company earlier this year, losing money hand over fist.

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