> Building the software post-launch of the integration would have easily taken 2.5 years at minimum.

What you have said is correct, it lets you build software much faster. The question however is: is that software making money for the company? (Not talking about what you built but in general)

I think, with AI, companies are saying yes to a lot of things they would have said No to ik say 2020. And as a result realizing “just building it” is not the answer.

Previously your GTM team or Product team would say “If we ship some big project X, we unlock $Y in revenue” but now people are realizing that those projections were really more of a hope. So companies are spending so much more tokens and shipping so many more PRs based on hope but a lot of it just doesn’t turn into meaningful revenue, especially not in short term

Yeah, thats why I meant I was in a spherical cow-situation, this was a situation where we took over a company in the exact same field and I had 5 years of experience on which tweaks would need to be made to be able to rationalise away positions.

This sort of system only works with internal software and an unusual amount of data. If we were in the business of selling that software we could not have charged a higher price for the new version over the old, the tweak could only be unlocked because we were able to control staff hiring and staff onboarding fully to make use of the new changes.