Azeem Azhar

Now, you know, I said I liked academic research, tends to be more robust.

I'm just going to say this piece is not from academic research.

It's from a survey of plumbers across the US.

There was a few hundred who were surveyed.

Even the plumber story is a really wonderful one.

So within this group, a large number have been using ChatGPT for running their businesses.

So for invoicing and outbound communication, but also for diagnostics.

So it's speeding their problem identification up.

And they certainly report measurable revenue gains and more time to actually do the work.

It's a small scale survey, but it's interesting nonetheless.

And I think it resonates with the way that I have used ChatGPT when I've been fixing electrical and plumbing problems around the house.

Also not something I do particularly well.

I suppose what we're seeing here is that individuals and teams,

are seeing productivity benefits and lots of us individually can can speak to that but does it necessarily lift the firm-wide productivity or does it necessarily lift the wider economy i mean if all of these stories are so positive where's the beef a quick note if you want to support us in bringing more of these conversations to the world please consider subscribing to the show

And there is some other data, again, that shows that there's this gap emerging that 85% of engineering organizations that use AI tools are using AI tools, but only 59% of them are getting measurable productivity gains.

Again, this is not an academic survey, so read into it what you will.

But let's start by saying 59% getting productivity gains a couple of years after these tools is available is a pretty impressive state of affairs.

And the question is, why the gap?

As you know, I wrote an entire book on the gap between the capabilities and the improvements in technology, their exponential nature, and our ability to harness those.

So this is a microcosm of the exponential gap, and this is the hard part.