I think a lot of the reasons for this is because AI helps provide a productivity boost to non-profitable sectors of most businesses, i.e. software development, finance, HR, etc. Since these departments do not directly drive profits, there's no visible bottom line to make meaningful observations on.

I do software for a retail company now and we've been having a similar debate: AI helps me and other departments do work more efficiently, but me getting a feature out the door faster is better for the business but doesn't get more products off the shelves. So, to the shareholders and the C-suite, is AI doing anything for the company?

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comte7092 a day ago | parent | next [-]

> Since these departments do not directly drive profits, there's no visible bottom line to make meaningful observations on.

“Bottom line” is a reference to costs, it doesn’t matter whether a department is a profit center. If AI is making these departments more efficient, it should show up in the bottom line.

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credit_guy a day ago | parent [-]

AI does show up in the bottom line, but it’s not attributable to AI. How can you tell if the last month’s 20 new features vs 10 new features the same period one year ago are due to AI or simply to your developers being smarter/working harder/returning to office, etc?

	▲	comte7092 a day ago \| parent [-]
		I would pose that question back to you, if it isn’t measurable, how are you certain that it is affecting the bottom line?

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JumpinJack_Cash a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> > I think a lot of the reasons for this is because AI helps provide a productivity boost to non-profitable sectors of most businesses, i.e. software development, finance, HR, etc. Since these departments do not directly drive profits, there's no visible bottom line to make meaningful observations on.

So the right place to look should be looking at free time of employees or cognitive load/stress they are under.

How is it possible to measure that?

Anyways Goldman might not be the right firm to measure it because they are not interested in anything that isn't money.

	▲	codyklimdev a day ago \| parent [-]
		Very much agree on your last point. I think finding out whether or not AI is actually boosting productivity is a problem of measuring productivity period, which at the very least my current company is pretty bad at. For a developer, is their productivity their lines of code produced, hours worked, project tasks completed per unit of time, agile points completed per unit of time, PRs reviewed, PRs submitted? In more human metrics, is it what their coworkers say about them, what leadership says about them, what customers say about them, testers, QA? The amount of bugs they fix, the amount of bugs they don't ship? Sorry for the ramble, but apply this productivity measurement conundrum to entire corporations and it's no wonder that no productivity boost is being recorded. I'd be surprised if semi-accurate productivity measurements were taken in the first place.