Internally the hard data is there. On a budget of $2000 of API-priced tokens (Claude models + GPT models) we were able to migrate ~6 teams of infrastructure in 1 month, done by 1-2 people. Without AI it would've taken 10x longer wall clock time to do, and involved far more folks, and probably would have been much bumpier of a rollout. The big lift was mostly using AI for massive information gathering, digging through huge volumes of discussions, documents, commits, PRs, alerts, dashboards, etc pretty exhaustively for the past 5 years of history, to discover all the "chestertons fences" far more thoroughly than even the folks on the team who built it were able to. Then the 1-2 folks could go to each team with a super comprehensive "here is every need, every interaction, every discussion, everything you've ever done w/r/t this infeastructure, and here's how we're going to handle each of those with the migration we're going to do. We will do all the work for you, is that acceptable, yes or no?"

The teams throughly reviewed and brought up 2 overlooked cases, but mostly we all reminisced about things forgotten that AI discovery had turned up which would have been totally overlooked otherwise. Forgotten discussions, designs, outages, odd decisions, weird edge cases prepared for but never encountered, etc. Then they were migrated, it went smoothly, all to save a low seven-figures per year dollar amount.

The fundamental approach of exhaustively researching to that degree would never have been possible without AI. It's just not feasible to analyze 5 years of even one of those discussions sources (e.g. slack) to figure that out, let alone ALL of them. Now a team of ~1.5 engineers has tackled all that by leveraging AI.

The hard data is piling up in companies, but it'll take a while to get out there.

(Numbers and details lightly greeked in the above account)